How I Fell in Love with Science

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My name is Lilliana Zar and I’m a high school student from Los Angeles, California. I’m part of a national choir, I’ve sang around the world, and I’ve been acting since I was 5, but I would get more excited talking about biochemistry than I would about Barbara Streisand (although she did help me love my ethnic nose). I spend most of my time studying, but when I’m not, I’m using the microscope in my room, watching knee replacement or brain surgery, skiing, or swimming at the beach until the lifeguard tells me to come back to shore.

Some friends and I after singing at the Vatican this summer (second from the left).

How did you fall in love with science?

I’d assume my answer to this question is different from most people’s. I can actually pinpoint a finite period of time when I thought to myself, “Yep, science. That’s what I want to do for the rest of my life.” It spawned from the unrelenting din of summer homework. Unlikely but true, the most insightful moment of my life was a product of the American public education system.

At the March for Science Los Angeles

Truthfully, I’m not sure if anything could match the feeling that I had of knowing that I would be the lucky recipient of the information in that AP Biology textbook. Microbiology would give me the chills, I would be on the verge of tears reading about the brain, and I would sit for hours thinking about the fragility of our biosphere.

Science unlocks the secrets of our very systems, yet makes sure to let us know that we know nothing at all. That kind of uncertain certainty is something I find terrifying and paradoxical, but alluring and intellectual. It’s something I gravitate towards, a puzzle that relentlessly begs to be solved, and for these reasons, I can confidently say I’m in love.

A village in China offered me another paradox. It hosts some of the most polluted cities, but it also hosts villages that have seemed to function roughly in the same way they did hundreds of years ago. (Though now China is producing solar farms faster than the rest of the world!)

It eventually dawned on me that this is just one part of an entire world left unexplored. So I ventured out into this metaphorical scientific wilderness and discovered physics, chemistry, astronomy, and lastly, medicine, my favorite. Within that, anatomy, and from there I knew I wanted to be a surgeon — but now we’re getting into infinities and unknowns.

It was an epiphany at a specific moment in time. If I could graph my interest for science against time, it would be an exponential graph that begins its incline on that summer day when 14-year-old Lilly began reading ahead, and the graph would have no carrying capacity.

— Lilliana Z. , California

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