It took me years to find my native language. Until the third grade, my twin brother and I had debilitating speech defects that required extensive therapy and tutoring. So for four days each week, guidance counselors escorted us to a classroom with barren white walls, where we lost ourselves within a disorderly sprawl of grammar worksheets, crumpled Smarties wrappers, and progress charts. I had primarily struggled to enunciate my Ss and Zs, prompting my instructors to whip out overly worn-out decks of flashcards bearing the names of familiar phonetic foes. Forced repetition rarely lent a helping hand: “snake” became “thnake,” “zebra” became “sebra,” and I became restless. I felt trapped.

My attention wandered in those stifling moments to my instructor’s visual aids. Having locked eyes with my fourth zebra, I began doing what any sensible second grader would: I counted its stripes. Even now, I cannot pinpoint the exact motivation—perhaps to relieve my boredom or discomfort; yet I found the task oddly alluring, my fingers slipping like beads in an abacus to keep track. When my brother had his goaround, I finally snapped back into reality and blurted, “theventeen.” Seventeen stripes. My teachers, dazed as if I hissed in Parseltongue, slowly understood and checked my result using similar scratch work. Sure enough, it was correct. Only now have I realized that I walked out with more than another pack of Nerds.

Unbeknownst to me then, my first language was neither English nor Urdu: it was mathematics. I internalized at an early age that commonplace items—pencils, pins, pebbles—can all be reimagined as counting exercises. Observation, therefore, underlies my lifelong love for mathematics, a penchant to translate everything I saw into digits. The endeavor began but never ended with stripes: perched at the swing set during recess, I counted wood chips regularly as my peers swayed, bewildered, in my periphery.

I have since discovered that mathematics is far more than a numbers game. It’s not enough to shuffle variables around or to treat each subject—calculus, geometry, linear algebra—as separate entities. Like every language, math has an alphabet, syntax, and endless rules that tie seemingly unrelated concepts and so wield broad explanatory power. The same tools I used to model heat dispersion applied just as well to predict the behavior of a firm in a changing market. My experiences in proof writing further cemented that the pursuit of truth is paved with subtlety, discipline, and precision. Deceptively short proofs often turned into late nights, as stacks of crumpled papers laid bare my attempts at testing theorems and strategies.

But even I had my limits. The math became more abstract with time, and soon enough, I found myself untangling concepts in real analysis courses that eluded illustration. As one abstraction led to another, I felt detached from the world I once observed so closely—with blistered hands to show for it— and began starving for something more “real.” I wanted to use math to shape my world as much as understand it. Sold by the elevator pitch of “doing the math for the attorneys,” I became a research assistant during this formative stage at a firm called Resolution Economics. I found the adage intriguing, as I’d apply my sharpened skills to offer businesses insight regarding their compliance with employment regulations.

And as I had hoped, the firm’s emphasis on statistical analysis came exactly as advertised. In one of my first cases, I gathered timekeeping data from a plastering company to determine if employees were taking appropriately timed breaks, if at all. The physical files arrived in an unconventional format, so for over a week, I sat in the firm library, tallying nearly two years’ worth of records into Excel. The work was repetitive, grueling, and many of my peers took exception. But I loved it. With each timestamp came déjà vu, as though I were once again digging for wood chips. In all my cases, I felt a newfound sense of purpose. People’s livelihoods were at stake. I was now telling a story that only the language of math could tell.

A story without its cover, however, is still incomplete. With each case, I also learned that the law frames my entire analysis, detailing penalties, exemptions, and potential arguments. In the same way mathematics helped me find my voice and overcome speech defects, the law fascinates and serves me equally to resolve challenges others face in the workplace. I have since returned to the firm as a consultant, eager to build on my understanding and even more so to tackle cases head-on. Mathematics lies at the foundation of many issues in labor and employment law, and a law school education can help me unearth these connections in greater depth. As working conditions evolve, so too will precedent, and now I want to be the one to shape it. I want to be the one modifying tests for hiring discrimination that withstand potential biases in artificial intelligence. I want to be the one sculpting healthcare and benefits policies as businesses manage future mergers and acquisitions. And I want to be the one strengthening pay equity laws to ensure disadvantaged minorities receive their fair compensation. Whether in a firm or in policymaking, I don’t just want to “do the math for the attorneys” anymore; I want to earn my stripes as the “attorney doing the math.”