Arvid Tomayko-Peters •• Squish the Squid Productions

Arvid Tomayko-Peters
College Essay II

I grabbed hold of a gnarled bush in the undergrowth and dragged myself up onto the peak of the cliff. I stood up and looked down - one hundred feet below was the sandy ocean beach of North Truro. Dressed in khaki pants, a baseball cap, and white long-sleeved shirt to protect me from the unflagging flies and the searing summer sun, I walked back along the ridge to the place where I had left the surveying rod before climbing up. I extended it to its maximum height of 25 feet and placed it where I thought the transom would be pointing. Unfortunately, the transom was on the other side of the dense scrub-forest, some 300 feet away, and I could not see it. “Two feet to the north!” was the shout relayed from Graham at the transom. I had guessed right. I moved north. I was sweating and the dust rising off the dunes was getting in my eyes. “Too much!” I moved back. “Two inches to the south...” Eventually I got the rod on line so that Graham could read the measurement on the transom that would lead to our first meaningful data since I joined the team a month before.
Science is in my blood - it has always been a part of me. I have always wanted to know “WHY”. Why is the Cape Cod seashore eroding? How much? Where? In the summer before my senior year, I volunteered to work with a team led by retired geologist/ oceanographer Graham Geise to find out first hand. The team also included a high school science teacher, an Americorps worker, and a National Seashore scientist. The goal was to find out how the contour of the land had changed along the coastline. We started at the abandoned Air Force base in North Truro. Hacking our way through the underbrush, we located a 150 year old azimuth location using a GPS system. We used this point to shoot a line to the shore and figure out the amount of erosion that had happened over the last 150 years.
I have always been curious. I love science. Dinner conversations at home often concern something I have read in the newest issue of Scientific American or learned in advanced biology class. How do hydrogen fuel cells work? What enzymes are acting on the proteins we are eating right now? I study music; I play jazz, experimental and electronic music, investigating the intersection of mathematics and tone generation. I like to watch the behavior of animals. I saw a spider when I was holding the surveying rod on the cliff. It let out a parachute of silk and jumped off its branch, over the edge of the cliff and towards the ocean. Did it catch an updraft to return to the cliff? Had it in fact done this many times before, or was it taking a last leap to spider-infinity?
What all these endeavors of mine have in common is that they are applications of abstract thought to the world around me; taking the ideas I have learned and applying them to real life situations. No matter what path I decide to take in the future, whether it is music, science, or some other field, it must be one that challenges my curiosity and satisfies my need to understand the flight of the spider and power of the sea.

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