Encourage curiosity:

Margot Richlin ‘23 Audience Engagement Manager

If you were to ask my parents to describe my younger self in three words, I could al most guarantee you that curious would be one of them. As a kid I spent a lot of time in the car, and that served as the perfect environment for me to pester my mom with all of the ques tions that roamed my brain. Research by Harvard child psychologist Paul Harris sug gests that a child asks about forty thousand questions be tween the age of two and five.

I would go as far as to say that I doubled that statistic.

However, unlike most, my curiosity never dimmed with age. All that changed was my mother’s ability to answer my most obscure inquiries.

“Do memories exist even if you forget them?”

“Can birds fly backward?”

Yet still to this day, I would tell you that my biggest pet peeve is leaving the answer to a question unknown. Some of my questions led to an swers that helped me learn random fun facts, and others led to the dreaded response “I don’t know.” But ultimate ly, being a curious person has taught me far more than that.

That said, I found as I entered my junior year that my role as questioner shifted. I became the one being asked the questions.

“What school do you me to accept. All that I wanted was for my parents to be able to tell me that everything would be perfect and that I wouldn’t regret having different experiences

Recently, I have learned to take comfort in the unknown because the unknown is exciting and is something to be grateful for rather than

Ultimately, my curiosity be came one of my most fundamental traits that has allowed me to chase after my dreams and thrive in the unknown.