I was a first-grader on the playground running around when all of a sudden I slammed my head against a cement wall. The blood gushed out of the head as I lay there on the ground wondering what just happened. A day after the incident, I noticed a thin layer of skin forming over the area. As time passed by, the once gaping hole of blood on my forehead was replaced with a bright red gash that eventually turned into a cool scar to show my friends. This was when I first noticed the power of the human body.
Fascinated by the human body from an early age, I was ecstatic to learn more about the life of a cell. I remember sitting on the hard black benches in my freshmen biology class and watching the animations of cell replication, mitosis. A simple process of splitting into two parts occurs as an endless cycle, which results in the final product of humans. This effortless process occurs all the time and allows us to regenerate our skin cells. The thin layer of skin I noticed on my forehead forming was due to this staggering process.
Once I made the connection, I started to read pages and pages of articles about experiments on mitosis. I came upon a certain experiment that struck my eye: using stem cells to heal wounds. The wounds that would leave scars and marks could now be healed using stem cells. Stem cells, which start mitosis to create a layer of skin on areas where there are no more skin cells left. The more I kept reading, the more I was motivated to learn. The entire conquest from my head being hurt to my growing addiction to reading articles lead me to realize my future. My love for cells has allowed me to conclude that I want to spend the rest of my life studying them. There are countless possibilities for the experiments that you can do with cells. When I grow up, I plan on accomplishing my dream of researching how to use these cells to solve all types of medical problems.
As my interest in cells grew, I drained myself of all the easy-to-read articles and moved on to research papers. As a high schooler, my days were filled with classes, homework, and extracurriculars from the start to finish. However, I remember laying on my bed with my phone underneath the covers and reading research papers trying to comprehend what it says. It wasn't until I took AP Biology that I had a solid and in-depth foundation of cells. I started to understand the research papers and even thought of further developments to the experiments. Furthermore, I would watch hour-long lectures that I found on youtube from renowned colleges and researchers to grasp all the knowledge that I could. As a high schooler, I have built an immense amount of understanding on this topic in order to develop well-planned and impactful experiments in the future.
