For as long as I can remember, mathematics and science were my favorite subjects. As a child, I enjoyed solving math problems and doing science experiments. When I was five years old, my father, a mathematics professor, taught me how to do derivatives, and I was able to do this in front of his college students. It was a memorable math moment. In elementary school, problem solving questions were a delight, and there was great excitement in being able to solve hundreds of problems. Many of those problems involved not only arithmetic but much more.

During middle school, I attended a math and science camp and was involved with math applications in daily life, developing skits about famous mathematicians and other scientists, constructing gumdrop geometry structures, and wading in streams collecting different aquatic plants and animals. Again, math continued to be very exciting.

It was in my senior year at Denison University while completing three undergraduate majors (English, history, math) that I visited a friend in medical school and made the decision to become a physician. I then spent the next three years taking pre-med courses while working as a researcher at the Ohio State University Heart and Lung Research Institute. My background in mathematics proved invaluable throughout this transition period into medical school both in the classroom and in analyzing data collected from laboratory experiments.