At some point in middle school, I came in contact with the book "Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension" by Matt Parker. Around that same time, I had a couple of great teachers that accelerated me in math, and I started becoming obsessed with all sorts of things that were out of my realm, like quantum electrodynamics. I ended up writing a forty page essay about the EPR paradox at some point. This curiosity followed me through high school, and when I got the opportunity to graduate with an associates of arts degree at a local community college, I did just that. There, I completed every higher-level math course they offered.

When I got to university, I had a decision to make. I had gone to Washington State University on scholarship explicitly for an accredited software engineering degree, but I was taking higher-level classes like numerical analysis as a freshman. For a number of reasons, I saw mathematics as a path with more freedom in my career options while also managing to be more personally fulfilling to me; this was especially true for the field of applied mathematics. Through rigorous self-teaching, I found myself immediately immersed. My commitment led to a position as a general mathematics tutor, as well as the grader and TA for that same graduate-level numerical analysis class by the beginning of my second-year. I led small group tutor sessions and loved helping students understand various mathematical and statistics concepts in a wide range of classes, but my primary focus was always on teaching general problem-solving skills and getting students engaged and excited about mathematics.

After a semester of tutoring and joint-work with professors and other TA’s, I found myself pursuing higher-level mathematics on my own time, as the vast majority of my undergraduate mathematics had already been completed.  With the approval of my mentor and professor, I decided to take an in-depth graduate-level course as an undergrad on data denoising, Markov chains, and theoretical concepts behind statistical learning, alongside self-directed research on stochastic calculus. By this point, I had networked heavily within my field and I self-founded a team of mathematicians for work on and deployed trading strategies for sport.

Since most of my aforementioned undergraduate work was completed so quickly, I found myself branching out from mathematics and into other disciplines that interested me. While to this day I work on projects in a number of fields, my financial mathematics project sparked a particular fascination with economics. Economics was the perfect mix of philosophy, politics, optimization, and mathematical theory; I couldn't resist, and I'm glad I didn't. A few classes out of curiosity turned into a full-blown second Bachelor's degree. In just three years, I found myself graduating with two Bachelor's degrees.

Important and difficult problems exist in nearly all fields and subjects, and I firmly believe that we all have an obligation to do our best to solve such problems. Mathematics is the best scaffolding to finding solutions. This follows not only from the position of mathematics as a useful tool for manipulating data and models (which it is, and perhaps the most fundamental of them all in enabling modern society), but also as the biproduct of dedicating thousands of hours to the mastery of one skill; adaptable problem solving.

Take a look at my course history to get an idea of the kind of mathematics I am familiar with.