YORKTOWN – Clara Cho didn’t expect to win the Virginia Council on Women’s 15th Annual STEAM-H Essay Contest. In fact, she thought she’d been rejected.
The Tabb High School graduate was one of 10 winners across the state, and one of two from the Eastern Virginia/Hampton Roads region. Cho’s essay explored the connection between her family’s artistic background and her own interest in biology. On Aug. 13, Cho and the other winners were invited to a breakfast at the Executive Mansion in Richmond with Gov. Abigail Spanberger.
Cho said she was coming back from church with her family when her mom sent her a photo of the invitation letter.
“She actually didn’t believe me; she thought it was a scam,” Cho said.
Cho will be attend the University of Virginia to study biology in the fall with an interest in microbiology. But she didn’t grow up expecting to pursue a career in science. She had aspirations of becoming an animator when she was a child. As Cho notes in her essay, she grew up surrounded by art: her parents were music majors, one aunt is a professional opera singer and the other is a painter. An upright piano currently sits against one wall of her living room.
“Music taught me rhythm and structure,” she said in her essay. “Painting taught me attention to detail. Literature taught me to interpret, not just observe. Long before I understood science, I was already being trained how to notice small patterns that could turn into something living.”
This led her to biology.
Her interest in the subject was further developed through her experiences at the New Horizons Governor’s School for Science and Technology in Hampton, where she said students were encouraged to explore their fields of interest and develop their own research projects.
Cho found out about the essay contest while searching for scholarships. What she found particularly interesting was that the scholarship supported the arts and humanities, as well as the sciences. That idea became the foundation of her essay, in which she used her life experiences to explain how STEM and the humanities are inextricably linked.
“I feel like…liberal arts in general is really a foundation to expanding more on science, technology, engineering, math,” Cho said.
When thinking about what she wanted to write about, Cho said her epiphany came when she was talking to her uncle, who’s an author who lives in Korea, though Cho didn’t realize he was an author until they got to talking.
“He was working in a corporate (office), but then he found his passion for writing and transitioned his career to become an author,” Cho said. “And his wife is an artist, and I kind of just started to realize how my life was shaped by art itself.”
Listening to her sister performing an audition piece as Cho was sitting in front of the blank screen was the final push towards getting her essay started.
“I guess it kind of started flowing from there because when I heard the flute sound coming from her room, I realized that everything kind of started…from how my parents,” she said. “The essay is almost like my journey through childhood in retrospect.”
Cho said she frequently gets asked questions about being the only STEM-oriented person in her family.
“I’m just really grateful for my parents and my family, just the fact that they kept supporting me because even though they have really minimal knowledge in the field,” she said.
She added that, despite the differences in her and her family’s career interests, she still found their insights invaluable, such as her parents’ view on the importance of having passion for one’s work.
“My parents say…’If you don’t have passion for your career, then you’re going to get burnt out, and you’re not going to feel happy,’” she said. “Without them, I wouldn’t have gotten here in the first place.”
