Brandon Zhang :)

7th grade

When I was young, I was mainly focused on having fun: playing Brawl Stars and Minecraft and texting. Although I was getting good grades, I never was deeply interested in any of the content I was given in school. That was about to change. I had always been more interested with Math than Science and at the start of the school year I was even thinking about a career in Statistics (yes, this is not a typical 7th grader thought). Moreover, I didn’t even know what the periodic table was. Then, one day in mid February during science my teacher an image on the TV screen. I remembered verbally saying “Holy ****, what are my eyeballs staring at?”. It was the periodic table of elements. It was absolutely fascinating to me since I previously the only thing I really knew that was chemistry related was that 2 Hydrogen atoms + 1 Oxygen atom = H2O, water.

When my initial shock was over of seeing this weird concoction, I instantly began to focus on one element, that stood out from the rest. Mercury, the only liquid metal that was surrounded by all solids. And that is how my passion and interest for Mercury and chemistry started.

From then on, I somewhat ignored math and became extremely interested in science. While others during science would fall asleep, talk about the cubs, gossip about girls I would glue my eyes to the board, fascinated by all of the elements. From Universal Hydrogen to Electrifying Copper to Quicksilver Mercury, I was determined to learn all of the elements. I even used my own money to buy this a book exclusively about elements since I was so in depth with it.

Fast forward a week and my science teacher announces that we were doing a element project. We were to choose a certain element and do research on it. My teacher may have noticed by interest with chemistry or I got lucky with the random name generator, but I was the first person to pick their element. So as expected, I chose Mercury.

We had a week to finish this project but it only took me 2 days because of my excitement and determination to research about mercury. This was my favorite project I did in 7th grade and I was very proud of my efforts. A simple project, yet one that would endure with me as I continued studying chemistry.