In the 11th grade I made the decision to join my school’s brand new IB Diploma program, and be a member of Los Angeles Unified School District’s first ever International Baccalaureate graduating class. The challenge of being in that first ever class wasn’t that the classes were difficult, although they were, it was that all of us had no idea what was going on. Teacher and students, all of us fumbled through the two years that made up the IB program. The obstacles we faced were what made the program a truly satisfying intellectual experience. Going through the IB program gave me the courage to apply to work as an intern at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Despite my utter lack of experience I was hired. As a result I spent the summer before my freshman year at OSU analyzing lines of ammonia spectrum in order to find the lower state energies of the transitions that could not be assigned using the Hamiltonian model. This involved using a Linux based computer to fit a synthetic spectra to the observed data. The result of my ten week long internship was that I had found all of the line positions but only 30 of the 3000 lines I analyzed had trustworthy intensities. The method I was using to fit the ammonia lines did not work with such a complex molecule. As a result I learned a valuable lesson, not all research goes according to plan and much less works. Although I have no desire to be a spectroscopist, I enjoyed the experience and the chance to do research at such a young age. I have always loved the idea of exploring the universe’s secrets; I hope to pursue a PhD in Astrophysics after my time at Ohio State comes to a close.