I guess I was always meant to be a scientist. My aunt who used to babysit me could entertain me for hours with nothing but a glass of water, some spices, and a spoon. Performing my independent research, however, was the first time I ever did science for the purpose of helping others. My family does not have the best genes out there we have a history of a variety of diseases that are so far untreatable .

Pragmatically, the inspiration for this project is drawn from a series of backpacking excursion I embarked upon with my brother and father two years ago, which in the end totaled approximately 120 miles. Now the golden maxim of backpacking is to pack frugally. So, every day as I repacked my backpack, I would glare angrily at the extra weight of fire by friction set material I had to carry with me because it made the overall weight of my bag very onerous.

Before high school, I was never the one whose favorite subject was science. I loved to hang out with friends, read, and write; a future in science had never particularly appealed to me. My first week of high school changed that. Through the Science Research Program at my school, I have been able to have the amazing opportunity to work in a cancer research laboratory at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, NY, one full day a week, as well as 2-3 days after school, and 3-4 weeks during the summer.

I have long been fascinated by math, and more recently by biology. When my high school presented the opportunity to participate in research at a local university two years ago, I looked for a project that could help me see how the mathematics I learned in the classroom could be applied to help us better understand questions in biology . . . My advisor found Dr. David Eisenberg’s lab at the Molecular Biology Institute at UCLA, a lab studying, among other things, amyloid fibers and Alzheimer’s disease.

My interest in physics was born rather serendipitously in middle school when I stumbled upon the popular physics section of my local library. In no time at all, I told you the qualitative details of Young’s double slit experiment and how it contradicted certain previous classical notions of physics, but I could not have have taken a simple integral to save my life. So, due mostly to my lack of mathematical sophistication, I didn’t do much physics until my junior year of high school.

I wanted to work on something related to game theory. During my sophomore and junior years, I had bounced back and forth between various math concepts, but I always came back to game theory because it can describe interpersonal interactions in mathematical terms, an idea that was very intriguing to me. However, I looked for something beyond game theory’s most common applications, namely in economics, social psychology, and evolutionary biology. While searching for this new application of game theory, I noticed that cells, especially cancer cells, can behave strategically.

Before I entered high school, my older brother returned from his lab each day with a story about his work. I could always hear his excitement when he talked about his project. I knew I wanted to try my hand at research but the microarray analysis procedures he described did not appeal to me. Volunteering then at a local hospital, I wanted to pursue a hands-on study of disease, but was unsure how to go about it.

I love working on conjectures. Just as in the various Mathematical Olympi- ads in which I have participated, the conditions are already set; the challenge consists in cleverly using the hypotheses of the problem to produce the conjectured conclusion. Number theory, the study of properties of the ordinary counting numbers 1; 2; 3; : : :, is particularly rich in this type of problems, which range from puzzles for the general audience to the challenges on the Interna- tional Mathematical Olympiad to famous conjectures, such as Fermat’s Last Theorem and the Twin Prime Conjecture, which commonly remain unsolved for hundreds of years.

Four years ago, I began helping out at a school for children with autism: At the time, I saw this as an opportunity to give back to my community, with no idea that it would one day end up being the topic of my scientific research. I spent my time acting as both a volunteer and social mentor during summer programs, weekend trips, special events, and school days. A year later, my involvement with the autism community evolved as I began to recruit and organize students from my own high school to participate in volunteering and fundraising events for autism.

The public’s perception of the President of the United States has been a widely studied aspect in American politics since the birth of the nation in the eighteenth century. In recent years, with the inception of the 24-hour news cycle as a prevalent social characteristic, political scientists have deliberately analyzed the potential effects of the news media and its portrayal of the president on the public’s approval of him (Cohen, 2000; Wolf & Holian, 2006; Woessner, 2005; Schiffer, 2009; Cohen, 2004).

My very first science fair project, completed in the spring of my seventh grade year, dealt with the harmful effects of acid rain on a variety of common transition metals. This project laid the foundation of my dual interests in inorganic transition metal chemistry and the environmental applications of chemistry. One year later, my research switched gears towards the medical applications of transition metal chemistry. I devised an original recipe for baking powder by eliminating a standard ingredient, sodium aluminum sulfate, which has been identified as a possible chemical trigger of Alzheimer’s disease, and replacing it with a variety of transition metal compounds that are essential to the body.

Despite the changes in custom and language that occurred simultaneously in my life as I moved from South Korea to America, math was the one thing that made me feel secure and confident. Math provided me with a sense of direction through the confusion and cultural difference I had to overcome. Therefore, I began to devote my time to mathematics, taking advantage of all the research opportunities that were available in the field .

Most people cannot deny having procrastinated at some time; almost everyone can sympathize with the desire to delay working on an uninviting task. As a high school student, I have seen the extent to which both my peers and I postpone our work, putting off assignments until crunch time when we rush to get it done. Empirical studies have largely classified procrastination as a maladaptive trait, as it has been correlated with irritation, regret, self-condemnation, low self-esteem, despair, test anxiety, and lower GPAs (Burka & Yuen, 2008; Ferrari, Johnson, & McCown, 1995; Ferrari, 1998; Lay, Edwards, Parker, & Endler, 1989; Schouwenburg & Lay, 1995, Schraw et al, 2007, Tice & Baumeister, 1997) though I was well-acquainted with these findings long before I read about them in scientific journals.

My first task was to come up with a project idea. I have always loved statistics, so I wanted to do a project involving a lot of data and statistical analysis. I began looking on the internet to find some current research that was being conducted. I came across a man who was working with historical data. The data set that he was working with was ship log data taken by Benjamin Franklin to observe the Gulf Stream.

As global warming becomes more apparent, the effects of temperature on living organisms are causing great concern. However, most information regarding the impact of rising temperature on life is descriptive and inexact. Along with AP Calculus, I took AP Biology my sophomore year and was fascinated by the idea of emergent properties, the idea that life is not a simple sum of its respective parts; interactions between the different levels of biology create emergent properties that cause, for example, a cell to behave differently from a mixture of its component molecules.