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Personal Journal
Reflections on my journey as a student scientist, including challenges, thoughts in progress, and what I’m learning about myself along the way.
Helping Organize STEM Night at My High School: DRY ICE BUBBLES
A reflection on volunteering to help plan and host our school’s STEM Night for younger students and their families. Once a year, STEM club at my school hosts their annual "STEM Night", which involves elementary students from the school district coming to the High School building where us high school student put on science fair-esque projects. Mine was dry ice bubbles, and it works by placing dry ice in a glass filtering flask with warm water and a funnel on top of the opening
Jan 23
Climate Justice and Environmental Inequality Capstone: The GRZI
The Green and Resilient Zimbabwe Initiative is a proposed nonprofit for Buhera District, a rural area in Zimbabwe's Manicaland Province with around 245,000 residents. Most of them are subsistence farmers who grow maize and millet on communal land managed by local chiefs. When it rains, they eat. When it doesn’t, they go hungry. Buhera doesn’t have a water issue in the way I first thought. There is water underground, stored in aquifers beneath fields that are parched from the
Jul 16
Ecosystem Engineers Seminar: Fungi and Transportation Engineers
For our group project at YYGS, we compared two things that sound completely unrelated: fungi and transportation engineers. The point of the presentation was that they are actually solving the same problem, just in very different materials. Fungi are a whole kingdom of organisms, including mushrooms, molds, yeasts, and mycelium. They don't photosynthesize like plants. Instead they break down dead plants and animals and return the nutrients to the soil, which makes them one of
Jul 14
YYGS Symposium: Creating a Government
Governing Acempur: What I Learned Building a Country From Scratch For the weekend of my Yale Young Global Scholars session in the Solving Global Challenges program, my team wasn't studying a country, we were creating and running one. Our assignment sounds simple until you actually look at it: take a nation that had just won its independence, and build a government good enough to hold it together. A country carrying a heavy history Acempur is a fictional set of islands in the
Jul 13
My thoughts on the disparity in affluence between towns in Westchester
I go to school in Westchester County, and I have been trying to understand why hunger is so different from place to place in this relatively wealthy county. On paper, it is supposed to be one of the wealthiest counties in this country, but if you drive just eight miles, the situation completely changes. This is a mystery that has been bothering me. The county numbers indicate disparity. In 2023, according to it, around 11 percent of households in Westchester experienced food
May 30
Helping Organize STEM Night at My High School: DRY ICE BUBBLES
A reflection on volunteering to help plan and host our school’s STEM Night for younger students and their families. Once a year, STEM club at my school hosts their annual "STEM Night", which involves elementary students from the school district coming to the High School building where us high school student put on science fair-esque projects. Mine was dry ice bubbles, and it works by placing dry ice in a glass filtering flask with warm water and a funnel on top of the opening
Jan 23
Lunch With Tad Roach from the Equal Justice Initiative
As part of the Independent Learners Program (ILP), which involves researching a topic you find extremely passionate about, our group of about 10 students met together to discuss our initatives If you are unaware, or even aware, of who Bryan Stevenson and the EJI is, I would reccomend looking at at least one of the following Watch Bryan Stevenson's TED Talk, We Need to Talk About an Injustice Explore the EJI website Bryan Stevenson page Hover over the OUR WORK tab at the top o
Dec 5, 2025
Daniel Fine
High school researcher documenting a journey through science
These entries are part of my personal field journal, where I explore questions that spark my curiosity, track experiments, and reflect on what I’m learning across environmental science, biology and chemistry.
This space is where I organize my thoughts, analyze what I observe, and build on what I’ve learned.
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