Chemistry's Mental Effect by Rahul

Chemistry's Mental Effect by Rahul - August 2016 Scholarship Essay

As I am about to become a high school senior, I can easily say that high school has been no walk in the park for me. While some classes have come easy to me, such as Calculus or World History, others have had me staying up all night to study. The worst of them would be chemistry, specifically AP. There was a vast amount of information needed to be learned, as I literally read every page of the textbook, but the concepts were even more of a challenge in grasping and understanding. But despite the challenge chemistry has been, it has definitely been the class I have learned the most in and the class that has had the greatest impact on me.
Chemistry has fascinated me so much that after one year of honors level Chemistry in my sophomore year, I decided to take the AP Chemistry class to learn more in depth material about the subject. Those two years of chemistry have taught me information ranging from particles of microscopic size to chemical processes that run across the universe. The first year of the course taught me the fundamental basics of chemistry, such as equation writing. Once I learned the rules of writing out a chemical equation, I was able to apply it to almost any type of chemical process which help me learn more about the processes at the atomic level. Such skills set up knowledge that I will be able to use to pursue further content in subjects that require chemistry, such as biology, physics, and engineering. Chemistry taught me about the building blocks of matter and the processes that have driven the universe for billions of years.
Aside from the knowledge acquired in those two years, chemistry taught me how to think truly like a scientist. I learned how to not just memorize and regurgitate information taught in class, but to conceptually understand the ideas/concepts and question certain theories to further understand why certain phenomena occur in chemistry. For instance, with labs, at the beginning of honors chemistry, I would simply follow the steps required to complete an objective. But by AP chemistry, I took it up a step further. I would ask myself, “why am I doing this step? What is the purpose of adding this chemical, or heating this substance in this container at this temperature?”. This line of thinking would help me reason what should theoretically happen and then allow me to predict and compare it to the actual result. Questioning these procedures helped me think more about the fundamental concepts of chemistry which further helped me understand chemistry as ideas instead of words from a textbook. Equally importantly though, questioning these procedures helped me develop a sense of curiosity. I would start to ask “why?” more often which helped me when learning new material, or even when I just looked at a set of data.
Chemistry has changed the way that I think, in and outside of class. As I mentioned before, I have developed a sense of curiosity that has motivated me to try and understand things that I do not realize upon first glance. But aside from curiosity, the class has taught me how to analyze, which is one of the most important skills for any person to hold, in any subject. Since chemistry mostly revolves around analyzing data from labs and experiments, I learned how to see data in different ways and try and make inferences and conclusions by combining lab data with prior knowledge. This skill helped me in other classes aside from Chemistry, from analyzing a passage from a book in English to analyzing a graph in calculus to analyzing a countries’ history in world history. In all of these classes, I used the information given (a passage, graph, or documents) and combined it with my own knowledge. I was able to draw conclusions in these subjects because of the skills I learned in chemistry. The class taught me a fundamental skill that I will always possess and will always be applicable in everyday life. Chemistry has therefore taught me skills that have helped me succeed in other classes in high school and for college and for future endeavors.