Throughout my childhood, my interests have come and gone, and I was more or less occupied by scientific and even artistic hobbies during my free time. I loved to draw and consume books after books, be it great works of literature or texts about volcanology, astronomy, chemistry, geology, and so on. Yet even then, I never found the one passion I would always stick to. It would take many years before I stumbled upon something that would change my life forever. In fact, my life would be changed twice, and at the beginning of neither occasion did I suppose these new passions would consume me. But they did in the most unexpected and wondrous way.

One and a half years after moving to the United States, well after the time I began pursuing scientific hobbies, my elementary school offered a music class. Moreover, its teacher, with whom I keep in touch to the present day, passed a form to join the school band. I was not a musically inclined child – I never took music lessons or sincerely attempted to play the keyboard I had back in Moscow. Yet the prospect of playing a musical instrument allured my curiosity of what it was like to possess such a skill. From the next day onward, the path of my life turned the most it had had in a long time. I was not prodigious at the instrument at the start; I made just as many repulsive noises as everyone else. Frankly, I even became bored with the instrument and considered either switching it or abandoning music altogether. A sense of guilt, however, kept me from pursuing this decision. What if this feeling will go away over time? What if I will learn to love the instrument and be fantastic at it? What if this is all just a beginner’s dissatisfaction? I kept these doubts to myself, but after some time and experience with the instrument, all of these reasonings I created to explain my discontent turned out to be entirely correct. And I was happy to have not made a rash decision I know I would come to regret many years later.

The clarinet has since taken me many places, starting from a program that allowed me to play in Carnegie Hall, a program that for the first time allowed me to play in a symphonic orchestra at the Juilliard School, and a high school in which I won a music competition, among many others. Every single offer at these programs, as well as being assigned principal chair in several ensembles granted me a sense of belonging in the classical music community. Not only have I been its member, but a very fruitful one too. While this journey has started out as strong as what many others could only wish for, it has come to a temporary halt. My time at high school and the Juilliard Pre-College program ended nine months ago, and with it so did my professional studies of music, for now, as I unfortunately was waitlisted for all of the music schools I applied to. There were many circumstances that led me to picking the New York City College of Technology as the university I would attend for the time being, despite it being not even close to something I desired. I picked the applied mathematics major, and that is because, just as with music, mathematics shaped itself as an integral part of my life.

The way mathematics entered the realm of my existence was fairly expected, but not at all in the magnitude it did. While in middle school, I studied modern physics, a passion that stemmed from my childhood interests. It was, in fact, the one passion apart from music that I had been seeking my entire life, but it never quite fledged out. As an aspiring physics connoisseur, I eventually reached a point where I could not continue serious study without learning higher mathematics, a realisation that came from opening Einstein’s The Meaning of Relativity. And from then on, the study began. I acquired a mathematics textbook by the name of Differential and Integral Calculus by Clyde Love. It is not simply a long list of sequential equations with soulless explanations between them. On the contrary, it is a masterpiece for what it is. It was written from the heart, eloquently in the style of the early 20th century. With every page I read, I increasingly perceived mathematics as a form of art rather than mere formality, as the most perfect and beautiful puzzle pieced together by nature. I spent as much as four to five hours every day absorbing its insights and challenging myself to create difficult problems that I would try to solve. This book alone instilled in me an undying love for mathematics more than any other book I have ever read, and it taught me to view mathematics from a point of elegance. My mindset was quickly shifting towards mathematics, and I found myself more interested in abstract formulations than applications in the physical world. This was the most remarkable read of my life, as this book alone changed me more than any other one I have read (though Jules Verne’s novels come very close).

From then on, all throughout high school, I dedicated my efforts to excelling in mathematics and studying its complexities. As my high school was very artistic, it did not provide me with a sense of belonging in any kind of mathematical community, though it did for music. At the New York City College of Technology, however, this drastically changed, all to my surprise. I did not expect anything from this school, let alone anything outstanding, but I had been proven wrong in this regard. In my second semester, I came in touch with the head of the mathematics department to aid my scheduling, and the conversation quickly spun off into a realisation of my mathematical aptitude. He recommended I do a research project in number theory and attend private conferences presented by one of the world’s greatest living mathematicians, Melvyn Nathanson. This was a remarkable jump in my mathematical career, as not only did it grant me an opportunity to meet and potentially collaborate with some of the world’s most brilliant minds, but give exposure to some of my private mathematical works, which my professor recommended I publish in a journal. I had never expected anything of this magnitude from this university, but I am tremendously happy to have had my expectations disproven and gradually become a member of the mathematics community. I always felt rather removed from it, as I performed all of my studies on my own, but these occasions encouraged me and offered me a sense of belonging like nothing else quite has.

Being a part of discourse communities is very variable from person to person. I am not someone who gives a lot of importance to communities as opposed to the individual. Communities are not a large part of my life, and frankly I am a rather private person. Yet at the same time, knowing that there are people who are aware of my work, who accept me and welcome me into their circles, enlivened to hear what I have to contribute, warms my heart. Knowing that somewhere I am not forgotten about makes me sincerely happy. It may seem contradictory to what I said a few sentences ago, but in a way, despite not thinking about discourse communities much, belonging to them is still quite meaningful to me, and I appreciate every person who has done good to me and brought me up.