I don’t like math. And it’s not because I find it boring or useless, but because I simply don’t get it. Ever since second grade in Russia where I failed most of my addition quizzes and couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out how a fraction worked, math has not been my strong suit.
When I moved to Saratoga in seventh grade, the heart of the tech industry, no one knew what to make of me — a full-on humanities kid who loved learning languages and struggled in STEM.
After hours of poring over a textbook by myself, I caught up with the material, but never with the way of thinking that math problems require; the “logical” way. I guess I could blame my mom for showing me letters instead of numbers when I was just a few months old, but seeing as how I speak five languages now, maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing.
I’ve always had a knack for books – from my grandmother’s obscure poetry collections to children’s science fiction stories – I’d read anything that I found in our Russian apartment. Going to a Russian-Spanish bilingual school cemented my passion for language.
In any case, math has always been written off as my weakness and family members excused it as a given shortcoming.
Science, however, is a whole different animal. Everyone in my family is somehow involved in medicine, whether it be as an emergency room doctor (my stepdad), pharmacist (my grandmother) or sales rep for a medical company (my mom.) I was an exception, maybe even a disappointment.
In rebellion, I filled my schedule with two language classes and two history courses. I also took two math classes in junior year — Trig Pre-Calc and AP Statistics — but only because Statistics sounded fun, which, luckily, it was.
It was only during senior year, when I started to get serious about colleges and visited numerous counselors, that I fully realized how big of a mistake this was. It turns out that my taking no science junior year had consequences. I failed to meet the “desired” standards of some Ivy League schools that wanted four years of science. I had two B minuses every year of high school (one for math and one for science), and my good but not great score on the SAT math section wasn’t convincing anyone that I simply “chose” not to take the classes. I was bad at STEM, and it was obvious.
Despite this gaping hole in my application, I applied to more than 20 schools, all from the top 50 universities in the U.S., with my only safeties being the UCs. It was a risky move, but then again, wasn’t my entire high school course load?
After an insane college-writing frenzy during winter break, I faced the hardest part — waiting. I managed to convince myself that I would get rejected by all universities and end up going to community college; my far-from-valedictorian GPA was certainly not boosting my confidence.
Then came the day: March 18. In a sleep-deprived haze, I worked on my math homework. Just when I had almost given up on understanding differential equations, the door opened. My mom came in with a huge smile on her face and said, “You got into Northwestern.”
The words didn’t really register in my mind at first, but when they did, I started crying, laughing, dancing and screaming all at the same time. I was in shock and euphoria.
And it didn’t even matter that I was bad at math.
