Change Doesn't Come Easily

In middle school, I told myself I wouldn’t do the stupid things Taylor Swift wrote about in her songs.

My freshman year of high school, I fell in love with a senior.

It was like something out of a movie. Cliché. And, as these kinds of stories go, I ignored my friends and family who warned me that nothing good was going to come out of it. Just as they predicted, I crashed and burned.

It took me a month to stop crying. A year to stop hurting. This isn’t, however, a sad story.

I became reclusive, focused only on myself. It was a time of self-growth (though my friends were probably worried about me and my sudden change in attitude). My sophomore year, I convinced the administration of my high school to let me take an astrophysics class usually offered only to seniors. That class inspired me to delve deeper into astrophysics.

That summer I began some astrophysics research at the local observatory, where research was unheard of. My junior year, I detected exoplanets, won the Eastern Idaho Science and Engineering Fair, and qualified for the Intel ISEF, attended RSI, won more and went further than my freshman self would have ever imagined.

From my heartbreak came accomplishment.

For my freshman self, it took great pain to invoke change. It took me many experiences to realize that change doesn’t have to come after consequences. I thank my freshman self for teaching me to be an open person willing to change. In these times of diverse people, opinions, and ideas, such flexibility and adaptability is important; especially for a person like me, going from enclosed Twin Falls, Idaho, to the melting pot of MIT.