Freshman year, I thought “nerd” was something other people were. The kid who had a periodic table taped inside their locker. The one who voluntarily read the Campbell Biology textbook over the summer. Not me. I liked science and math, sure, but I wasn’t about to spend my Friday nights solving mole conversions for fun.

Then sophomore year happened, and I found myself doing exactly that.

I joined Science Olympiad that fall because my friends were doing it, and it seemed fun. I picked the Optics and Chem Lab events because they sounded vaguely tolerable, at least more tolerable than the other cultish clubs at North High.

Next thing I knew, I was spending two hours after school measuring pH with old paper strips or complaining about how the teacher’s indicator solution was too pink and didn’t hit endpoint. On weekends, I was testing flame colors with a blowtorch in my friend’s warehouse and debating whether prions were technically living. Not exactly cool behavior, but I didn’t care.

By junior year, the descent into full-on nerd-dom was complete. I wasn’t just studying for chemistry, I was embodying it. I was looking up research topics in computational chemistry because it was cool to me. I was correcting practice test questions for Science Olympiad, and it was actually fun. I was that kid.

And to be honest? They were the best times of my high school career.

The turning point might’ve been when I started doing research. I applied to a summer internship in computational chemistry on a bit of a gamble. Somehow, I got accepted. In July, I flew to Nashville to spend almost ten weeks making a machine learning model to predict whether a drug represented by some ones and zeroes would kill you or not.

I was writing Python scripts at 10 p.m. in this room a local rabbi’s family so graciously allowed me to stay in, and debugging energy minimizations in the Vanderbilt chemistry building while drinking terrible vending machine coffee. It was messy and technical and way over my head half the time, and frankly, I couldn’t get enough of it.

And in the midst of all that, I competed in virtual Quiz Bowl tournaments with my brother and my friends. I would’ve made fun of myself for this as a freshman, but I’d sacrifice so much to be able to live it again just one more time.

I came back and turned the project into a 20-page research paper for the Regeneron Science Talent Search. I rewrote it five times, fixed 30 citations, and turned it in with 17 minutes to spare before the 8 p.m. November deadline. In January, Mrs. York walked into my sixth period poetry class with Dr. Holtzman announcing I was a semifinalist, and I just scoffed, but when I realized they were being honest, I was in complete and utter disbelief. I’d submitted a paper with two footnotes essentially whining about why my VAE’s hyperparameters could’ve been better, and someone actually read it.

More than the science, though, it was the people. I spent most of senior year surrounded by other nerds, the kind of people who bring TI-84s to lunch just to mess around with matrices. Some of my best nights weren’t parties but problem set marathons. Like the time we stayed on a Discord call until 1:43 a.m. the night before the first AP Physics C test, me trying to teach people how to pick a Gaussian surface. Or the time we tried to “study” for AP Calculus BC by doing practice problems, but it devolved into us realizing that studying wasn’t fun anyways and abandoning it. We weren’t nerds because we needed to be, since we barely studied; we were nerds because it was something that brought us together.

And no, I didn’t burn out. I got tired, sure. There were weeks where it felt like every spare moment was getting eaten by lab reports and practice exams. But somewhere in the chaos, I realized I was actually happy. I liked chasing down the weird, frustrating, technical stuff that made my brain hurt. I liked solving problems with people who got it; not in a competitive way, but in that “this is insane, let’s survive it together” kind of way.

What I’ve learned is that being a nerd doesn’t mean being a genius, or doing ten extracurriculars, or knowing every element on the periodic table (though my mentor at Vanderbilt made me memorize them anyways, and I’m only now starting to forget them). It means caring deeply, maybe too deeply, about something weird and specific. It means getting excited about things other people ignore, and finding people who are just as unbothered by how “uncool” that is.

I used to think being a nerd meant sacrificing fun for grades, because that’s what everyone else was doing, so I blindly followed. I had no clue about anything college-related, but I figured I’d do it because everyone else was worried, so it must be important, right? But honestly, I’ve had more fun debating Taylor Series convergence than I ever did at pep rallies. I don’t say that to be edgy; I just mean it’s okay to enjoy what you’re good at, even if it’s not the loudest thing in the room (though oftentimes, we were, since I think some of us had trouble keeping our excitement to ourselves).

So no, I didn’t always think I’d become this person. But now that I am the kid who runs a science fair booth and still has the Desmos tab open from lunch, I’m not turning back.

Being a nerd got me into research. It made me friends. It got me a free trip to Tennessee and way too many semifinalist plaques from potentially racist congressmen that I’ll probably lose in my move to college anyways (never thought I’d go to college either, but here we are). But more than that, it made me like high school.

And that’s more than I ever expected.