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. At that point, I realized that I could actually just go to the library, check out books, and learn math and physics on my own, which is exactly what I did. Although all of this self-learning was undoubtedly valuable, the one experience that was truly integral to reinforcing my interest in math and physics was the research project I conducted (and eventually submitted to both the Siemens and the Intel STS competitions) in the summer after my junior year . . . I conducted the research at the University of Maryland, in the Theoretical Quarks, Hadrons, and Nuclei group (TQHN). Naturally, I was really excited to be working on real problems in theoretical physics - problems I had previously only read about. My research, which I will discuss below, focused on Quantum Chromodynamics, which is a part of the Standard Model of particle physics that deals with quarks and their interactions . .

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