“This is a story of how I fell in love with math. It all began in the 4th grade and I meet my 4th grade teacher and she would always considered herself a mathematician. Her energy, motivation, and her love for math basically rubbed off on me to love math as well. Her methods of learning math was so easy for me to understand that it made learning math fun! The one thing that really helped me learn math was learning multiplication like my 2 times table, 5 times table, etc. She believed that the times table was the foundation of math and that if you know your times table from the back of your head then the rest of math will be a breeze. There was a phrase she would always tell us and that was “Go the extra mile!”, and she explained that this doesn’t apply just to math but in life as well. If you’re willing to put in the extra mile in anything then you will go far. I took that to heart since I still remember it and apply this to my future career in engineering. I went the extra mile in the 4th grade all the way up to the 12th grade and I will continue to go that extra mile.”