I spent most of my time working on research at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. My friend David Schurman and I developed an idea last year to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere. During the school year, we looked into it and contacted some of the main experts in the field, so by the summer, we had arranged to do research and began work on publishing a paper with scientists. We went to Boulder almost every day, usually by bus, and worked on the idea. I also spent a lot of time reading and played a lot of piano, too, just for fun. I also often went to the library downtown.

Having a lot of unstructured time can be paralyzing. I found that having a routine every day — getting on the bus at the same time every morning, etc. — is really comforting, in a way. When I imposed my own structure on the day, I got more done and felt better. With scientific research, I didn’t expect certain things to take nearly as much time as they actually did. It was very easy for me to get caught traveling down rabbit holes and I found that I had to constantly make sure I was

still on the right track.

 

During the summer before 10th grade, I spent a lot of time trying to design and build a rocket engine. That was a lot of fun. I would read rocket design textbooks from the sixties made for NASA engineers and try to figure out how to scale down some of their designs. I remember distinctly - this was more than two years ago now - walking up and down alleys and digging in recycling bins for soda bottles for part of a compressed air tank that ran the fuel pump. I would get up at six in the morning and have breakfast in my basement and work on the rocket.

 

I think summer experiences can actually make you more interested in school. I have sometimes thought that I learn more during the summer than during school, but I think there’s an oversight involved there: summer experiences make parts of school more meaningful. I mean that you realize what you don’t have - for example, coming back to school after summer, you realize how wonderful it is to have an Innovation Lab. Or, I remember being particularly fasci nated by chemistry in 10th grade because I had just been working with those concepts during the summer, while working on my rocket engine. This year in math, I’m gaining a better understanding of certain atmospheric modeling concepts that I saw during the summer. Finding integrals in calculus isn’t just a topic - I see now that it is something you have to use all the time with atmospheric modeling equations. This makes a lot of calculus this year come to life.