To me, algebraic geometry has always seemed like the natural endpoint. Like everything I've learned since elementary school has been leading towards it. I love the idea of constantly having something to learn. It's impossible to be an expert in the field because there are always new ideas that you've never even encountered. Two researching algebraic geometers might work with concepts as far apart from each other as two entirely different fields of math. As Ravi Vakil describes the subject, "Understanding algebraic geometry is often thought to be hard because it consists of large complicated pieces of machinery. In fact the opposite is true; to switch metaphors, rather than being narrow and deep, algebraic geometry is shallow but extremely broad." I try to navigate this breadth in the style of Grothendieck's "rising sea." Surrounding myself with the right ideas until the next idea I encounter seems trivial. I have devoted myself to the study of mathematics because I love learning mathematics, and algebraic geometry lets me learn mathematics for the rest of my life. And eventually when I hit a wall where there is no more known about an idea, I will take the task upon myself to learn that which nobody has learned before. 

This summer I'm working through Vakil's The Rising Sea alongside Hartshorne, and doing REU research with Jenia Tevelev. The research has me doing a lot of background reading in derived categories, Fano varieties, and quantum cohomology, etc... Areas I'm coming to mostly from scratch, which is uncomfortable and good. Overall, I'm taking the time away from coursework to finally dive deep into the concepts and questions that have been nagging at me when I couldn't find the time to get to them.