When people ask me why I love STEM, I always start with the same answer: curiosity. From an early age I was the kind of person who had to understand how things worked, not just that they worked. When I was young, I was obsessed with Minecraft, and I loved building redstone contraptions and figuring out how to put distinct parts together into a whole working system. That curiosity showed up in real life too. I'm always wondering about the world around me. Why does a bridge hold weight? How does a phone know where you are? Why do some algorithms find a solution in milliseconds while others take hours on the same problem?
What I love most about STEM is that curiosity is the whole point. You're not just memorizing answers, like in many history classes; you're building the frameworks to generate answers yourself. That shift happened for me around 7th grade, when I started coding seriously. I realized I wasn't learning to follow instructions. I was learning to think in a new language. When a program actually worked the way I intended, the feeling was unlike anything else.
The other thing that keeps me motivated is impact. Engineering and data science aren't abstract. They show up in healthcare, education, accessibility, and infrastructure in ways that directly affect how people live. My work on a Parkinson's care wearable with Rice University's PATHS-UP program made that concrete for me. A low-cost prototype that monitors symptoms and alerts caregivers isn't just a cool device. It's a tool that could genuinely change someone's day, or keep a patient safer in a moment that matters.
I stay curious by seeking out problems that don't have clean solutions yet. That's what makes STEM feel alive to me: the messy, unresolved questions about AI and empathy, about how games teach better than classrooms, about what "affordable healthcare" could actually look like. Those are the questions worth spending time on.