Bow to my amazingness at BS

Ok, so this post is the sum total of my highly developed talent for BS. You guessed it, it's my personal essay for the grant proposal. Feel free to bestow praise on my creation. If you're a grant reader, then just pretend you didn't see this. Actually, it's true. I just picked out the bits and pieces of my life that sound the best. Enjoy!

Fifth grade was an interesting year for me. It was a year of new things; new friends, new teachers and new subjects. That was the year I learned about atoms. Each of us was assigned an atom to model. Reading basic information from the periodic table I discovered how many protons, electrons and neutrons gold has and made my model from coat hangers and clay. Taking my model up for grading, I asked a question, “Mrs. G, how does everything in the atom stay together?” I was initially disappointed, my teacher had no idea. But instead of forgetting about it, like any reasonable 5th grader, I asked my mother to take me to the library. The book I checked out answered my question, but it left me with more questions. What are protons made of? How do atoms know to bond? My fifth grade teacher could not answer those questions either, and library books only got me so far.
It was not until my junior year in high school that my chemistry teacher began to answer what I wanted to know. I got answers, but they created more questions. What’s a wave function and how does it work? What determines what happens in a reaction? If I am made up of chemicals and reactions, what makes those work? Once again I got some answers, but many more questions for my trouble. I was hooked. Chemistry became the axis around which my academic world spun. Every class I took, every paper I wrote, every book I read became part of my search for answers.
Naturally I decided to major in chemistry and once more there were answers, but this time the answers were different. They were qualified and less certain, and sometimes they were, “I don’t know if anyone’s ever tried that, why don’t you look it up?” and once in a while the answer is, “Lots of people have tried to figure that out, but no one knows.”
I was drawn to instrumentation, taking extra classes on the topic, because of the fantastic power it gives to observe the unseen. The classes I took afforded me the opportunity to see the inner workings of common instruments. There were four of us that day we took the cover off of an UV-Vis for the first time. Benji and I lifted our ancient Bruker model spectrophotometer off the narrow counter and onto the floor where we silently kneeled around it. Dr. Nalliah passed around a screw driver and each of us took a turn loosening the screws. My hand shook as I removed the last one from the case. Reverently, the four of us lifted the cover off that outdated relic. We each examined the simple assemblage of mirrors and electronics, marveling at the power of analysis in such an elegant design. In those few minutes I discovered what I wanted to do with my life. When I applied to graduate school, I picked only schools that had top-notch instrumentation programs.
Finally, I am on the brink of the point in my life where I can look for the answers myself. It isn’t as simple as just finding the right book in the library. I am in charge of finding the answer to a question no one else knows. Even more exciting than that, I am going to be part of developing instrumentation methods that will answer questions other than my own. The awe inspired by that first experience is still there and a thrill runs from my head to my toe when I consider the precipice on which I now stand.
In the future, I look forward to the chance to share my joy in questions and answers through teaching at a large research institution. As a motivation behind basic scientific research, nothing can be stronger than a strong sense to curiosity coupled with intelligence and perseverance. The chance to see these scientific values at work, first with my own mentor, and then passing them on as a mentor myself, is a goal I long to pursue.
This grant will enable me to focus large portions of my time on pursuing my scientific passions and goals, working with my coworkers and mentor to find a solution, and accumulating knowledge to pass on to my own future students.

Yeah, I know, I've got something on my nose. And I have a feeling it's not going away any time soon; it seems I'm going to be using this talent often in graduate school. Wish me luck!