UC Davis: Academic interest

My interest in chemistry began with a dead lawn. The summer I was fifteen, our backyard turned brown in patches no amount of watering fixed. My dad blamed the sprinklers. I borrowed a soil pH kit from my chemistry teacher and found the answer was in the dirt itself.The dead patches read 8.4, alkaline enough to lock up iron so the grass could not absorb it. The healthy strips read 6.8. One number explained everything. I started reading about how soil chemistry controls which nutrients plants can actually reach, and the abstract equations from class suddenly had soil under their fingernails.¹In class, I pushed past the curriculum. When we covered acids and bases, I asked my teacher why buffering capacity mattered, and she handed me a college textbook chapter on it. I worked through the problems for fun and brought her my questions, filling the margins with notes about carbonate systems.²Outside it, I ran my own experiment. I split the yard into a grid, treated half with elemental sulfur to lower the pH, left the rest as a control, and logged readings every week for two months in a spreadsheet. The treated squares dropped to 7.1 and greened up. The control stayed brown.³That project taught me that chemistry is not memorizing the periodic table. It is a tool for asking why something living is failing and then testing your way to an answer you can stand behind.At UC Davis, I want to study soil and environmental chemistry, where the same questions scale up from one backyard to the farmland feeding a state. I want to keep treating the world like a problem set with real consequences.⁴