Diego Romero got into Stanford with an assist from sourdough. When the pandemic began, Romero was 14 and quarantining at home in Portland, Ore., where he found the heralded cookbook Tartine Bread in his family’s kitchen. Four years later, he’d spent so much time perfecting that golden brown crust that he chose the “Create your own prompt” option for his college admissions essay and wrote: Is baking an art or a science?
“The change for me—from making good bread to great bread—happened when I put away that recipe book,” he says. (He now calls the book his “alma mater.”) “There’s more importance in just understanding the loaf, paying attention to the dough. Playing it by ear gets you to engineer how you approach the process.”
For Romero, the creativity needed to improve any baguette, croissant, or pizza crust helps make the case for baking as an art. The same concept applies to his academic interests in math and electrical engineering. He says that although many people view the hard sciences as largely formulas and number-crunching, “the whole problem-solving process requires a lot of creativity.”
Now a sophomore, Romero hopes to harness his creativity as an electrical engineer to solve problems created by climate change, perhaps using his love of circuits to address issues in battery storage or the energy grid. Or maybe he’ll dig deeper into battery chemistry. “You get to really invent a solution,” he says. “Nothing is purely just following a set of instructions.”
“When I’m baking, I’m pretty much always tweaking stuff. Every kitchen is different. Every environment is different. If you’re not always making changes for those little things, it’s not going to be exactly how you want it.”
“I’ve always wanted to open up a pizza shop. When I’m older, I think starting a business would be a fun challenge. I don’t know how I’d feel about making a big, successful pizza chain. I think I’d more just want it to be a passion project—serve a few customers at night, make sure it’s really quality over quantity, make the best pizza in town.
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“I took [Computer Science] 106A in the fall, and the professor talked about that big aha moment where you put that missing puzzle piece in. You’re seeing the problem in a certain way that breaks it down and makes it super simple and satisfying for your brain to understand. Finding those moments is something that I really enjoy.
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“I really like circuit board design. There’s this very visual aspect to drawing all the little electrical traces on the board, making the perfect geometries. It’s fun to play around to see which design is more efficient, which one is going to save you the extra couple cents to make the board a little bit smaller. I’ve got to put this component in just the right spot, make sure the trace is just thick enough to reduce the resistance but also look nice. It scratches that itch.
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“The summer after my sophomore year [in high school], I got an internship at Portland State University designing and building a portable wind turbine. That was my first experience bringing math and science into the sustainability world. I was very confused for most of the internship—the math was above my pay grade; I did not have enough physics. But instead of feeling almost paralyzed, like, Can I really do this? it was, like, I need to do this.
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“Before I went off to college, everyone was like, ‘Yo, you need to keep baking because you’ll make so many friends.’ There’s this birthday fairy role in the dorm, and I just remember thinking: This seems like a way to do that. Working with the other birthday fairy, we made a Google form, like, tell us which birthday cake you want. We got 20 boxes of chocolate and 20 boxes of vanilla. When you don’t know anyone in your dorm yet, you just want to make that connection. I think it’s really powerful.”
Kali Shiloh is a staff writer at Stanford. Email her at kshiloh@stanford.edu.
