How I Became an Aspiring Cosmologist: My 8th-Grade Spark | My Dear Dairy Ep:1
The Catalyst at 14 : The 8th-Grade Moment That Sparked My Journey to Cosmology How a rural classroom, a science teacher, and a five-minute video of the International Space Station set an aspiring cosmologist on her path. Some nights, I still stand outside and look straight up, asking the same question that has followed me for almost a decade: how did this universe begin, and how will it end? It's a strange question for a teenager to carry. It's an even stranger one to carry growing up in a small rural school, where "space" mostly existed in textbook diagrams — not in real conversation. But before I knew a single equation, before I understood what "research" even meant, before I had ever even heard the word cosmology — someone handed me a telescope I didn't know I needed. Not a real one. Just a phone screen, a science teacher, and one ordinary class in 8th grade. This is the story of how my journey toward cosmology actually began — and the first ...