Space Camp, August, 2015

During the summer of 2015, at the age of 12, I attended NASA Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama. This was before my parents moved to Manhattan, so I could go to a competitive, STEM-focused high school, before I graduated from Bowdoin College and Brown University with an MSc in physics and five years of astrophysics research. This was before thousands of hours of note-taking and reviewing lectures, before late, late nights finishing problem sets, and before the pressure of grade-determining finals. This was before I doubted my worth and before I felt the isolation of not understanding a class that I believed everyone else was getting. Indeed, this was before I really knew what it meant to study physics. But I did know that there was something in physics for me, an intangible but constant pull to study the universe.

Returning to school in the Fall, I struggled with math and science. Maybe it was a confidence issue, or maybe it was that I was told I had a confidence issue by well-meaning teachers who missed the mark, but whatever made STEM classes so difficult for me also galvanized my resolve to succeed. Indeed, facing those early challenges, I adopted a mindset that I would put in any amount of work to learn the quantitative tools I needed to study physics. This served me well as I mastered my classes and was accepted into Horace Mann for high school.

And yet, as I took more classes throughout my higher education journey, from AP Electricity and Magnetism to graduate-level Quantum Mechanics, I found that it wasn’t the material I was coming up against so painfully; it was the culture around it. Indeed, especially at advanced levels, there was an idea of ungraspable genius, a toxic and damaging belief that one could only achieve success in analytical fields through self-abuse: lack of sleep, unending review, and constant improvement, and that even then, some people just weren’t cut out for math and science.

While I enjoyed research and the concepts I was studying in my college and graduate classes, the homework and high-pressure exams were consistently gutting to my sense of self-worth and to my love of physics. At both Bowdoin and Brown, the things that helped me stick with physics were the classmates who could admit their own fear and anxiety about grades, the professors who spent extra time explaining complex concepts during office hours. Indeed, it was the softer community that formed around honesty about not understanding, admitting that what we were studying was so incredibly hard, where I realised that there was no real and safe form of success without asking for help and guidance from people who understood the experience better than me.

Anna and I met and bonded over this mutual understanding of the rigrous cultrue of physics and math and we founded Axia with the hope of facilitating grounding support around STEM classes for all students. Despite a culture of chauvinism, burnout, and limiting beliefs about who gets to do science, we have dedicated ourselves to connecting students with tutors who function as both teachers and mentors, bringing joy back into high-level study. We rely on our consultation interview and meticulous hiring process to make sure that every one of our students is placed with a person who can guide them through academic challenges with experience and tailored instruction. I know first hand that anyone can succeed in these “weed-out” classes, anyone can pass these “impossible” tests with the right support; what’s more, they can flourish.

I look back on the kid I was when I went to Space Camp: curious, hopeful, and painfully determined to succeed and I’m proud of her. But I am even more proud of the person I have become now with the reaization that constant isolated striving is not what unlocks the secrets of the universe. It is instead being humbled by the complexity of our existence, the beautiful and infinite rigor of the languages we have developed to understand our Universe, and the connection with others that we can find through that, in being honest and asking for help without shame. Our goal at Axia is to make that process one step easier, because we believe that all minds merit success.

Brown MSc Graduation, May, 2026