To Math Club

The following essay is adapted from my personal statement when applying to US colleges.

My heart skipped a beat when Mr. Collins repeated the question for the second time. I shrugged and tilted my head to the side. Puzzled, I played back every word he’d just said in my mind; was I just misunderstanding him, or was I unlearned? When he gave up trying to explain it in words, however, and wrote $a^2+b^2=c^2$ on the board, I realized my problem did not lay with my then-limited second-grade English vocabulary. I had simply never heard of the Pythagorean theorem before. Although I was in 7th grade and clueless about competitive math, he asked me to join the practice after school that day.

The bell rang, and I pushed through the stream of people to find room 202, walking into a sea of unfamiliar faces. As the meeting began, I was drawn into a new world of challenges waiting to be tackled. For most, complex equations rendered in LaTeX are an indecipherable foreign language. For me, symbols have a certain elegance and beauty to them: the curious logic, concise annotation, the patterns waiting to be discovered. That was when I realized the truly universal language was neither English nor Chinese, the two most widely spoken idioms in the world, but rather math.

My bilingual education, a byproduct of attending schools in various countries, had always been a source of envy for some of my classmates and family friends; I was lauded for being a native English speaker. What they didn’t see, however, was the price I paid for it. When I was younger, I loathed moving and seemingly losing everything. I was a shy, introverted kid, which made each of my friendships more meaningful, yet also each goodbye extra devastating. While promises to stay in touch were always made, most proved difficult to keep while so young. All this moving to and fro seemed so disruptive to me then, as I had no way of seeing how it would shape my life for the better in years to come. Looking back now with more maturity, however, has helped me gain a clearer grasp of its implications on my life and how I become more outgoing around unfamiliar faces, which surprisingly, math has played a leading role in. I now realize the profound impact it has had on my life as I moved around the world every three years. As I was forced to speak different languages, live in distant lands, and say farewell to people I held dear, math and competitions have remained a means of relating to, as well as staying in touch with others, and have helped me open and continue every chapter of my life.

By the end of the meeting, I had my first taste of what it meant to be part of a close-knit group. Conversations about math that began in the classroom would extend through lunch, after school, and into weekends. While Mr. Collins helped me find my passion and introduced me to many concepts, more importantly, he showed me the two main tenets of building a community: giving back, and supporting those who come after you.

Four years later, twelve time zones away in Taiwan, I was tutoring my own small calculus course, eager to inspire students the way I had been just a few years ago. You could hear a pin drop in my normally vibrant and chaotic classroom as I stood at the board writing a triple integral to begin class. My students stared at me incredulously when I announced that we would be able to understand it together in only a few months. Dozens of sessions later, seeing the spark in my pupils’ eyes when they finally grasped it was even more fulfilling than learning it myself. Math is stereotypically seen as a solitary discipline for awkward dweebs. Ironically for me, though, it is a way of connecting—with both the world and other like-minded enthusiasts.