Weston Barger of Conway, who called himself “a high school teacher’s worst nightmare,” just completed an internship with NASA and is moving to Seattle today to start working toward his doctorate.
The 23-year-old who didn’t care about high school has fallen in love with learning and research, particularly math.
“When I was in elementary school and very early middle school, I was a straight-A student, and I really loved school,” he said. Barger was in the gifted-and-talented program, too.
“Then I just lost all interest,” he said.
It was school, not learning, that he lost interest in.
“I taught myself guitar; I taught myself computer programming.”
He said that later on, school wasn’t rewarding to him anymore, and he flunked a couple of high school classes.
“It was a constant battle the whole time. I didn’t care about anything except guitar. I wanted to be a rock star, a metal star,” he said.
The license plate on his Toyota Corolla is Shred, “slang for fast, flashy metal play,” Barger said.
He taught guitar lessons for a while when he was in high school, and he was in a metal band called Archaic Design.
At one point, he thought he’d just live his life giving guitar lessons, but he said his parents, Steve Barger and Michele Lemon, and his stepfather, Jim Lemon, encouraged him all along.
He said his father has a doctorate and conducts Alzheimer’s research at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, and his mother, who works at Acxiom, “is wicked smart.”
After he graduated in 2009 from Conway High School, Barger said his parents suggested that he apply to college, and he applied only to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. He first was rejected, then accepted on a remedial basis, thanks to his high ACT score (which he modestly asked not to be published).
He started out in engineering, but switched to math.
“Math is very different at a high level than how it’s taught at high school,” he said. “A lot of things about it I really identified with. I realized how beautiful it was.”
He was a math tutor as an undergraduate student, and he said he realized the biggest obstacle to people learning math is their emotional reaction to it.
“Math is very humbling, even to people who practice it,” he said.
Because Barger had been inattentive in high school, he struggled at first in college math courses. He flunked two Calculus 1 quizzes and went to the tutoring center on campus, “and I met some guys who were really into math,” he said.
“Once I got over the technical problems and could see the mathematics behind it, I was immediately snagged,” he said, snapping his fingers. He ended up with an A in the course.
During his freshman year, Barger made a decision that changed everything.
“I had this moment my freshman year that I was done making grades that didn’t reflect my ability. I made this goal of making a 4.0,” he said.
Barger said he felt privileged to be in college because he knew “if not for my parents and my position in the world, I would be doing something horrible,” such as working in a job he hated.
“It was fun and a challenge,” he said of his goal. “It wasn’t a fight — it was more like a project.”
Barger said one of his personality traits, which can be an advantage, is to be somewhat obsessed when he sets his mind to something.
He said when he woke up every day, his goal was to get his work done.
“Mom would call and say, ‘You should go have fun this weekend,’ and I’d say, ‘No, I’ve got to study,’” he said, laughing.
His second semester at the U of A, he was accepted into the Fulbright Honors College and wrote his thesis on computational math, for which he received a perfect score.
What is computational math?
“That is math problems too large, too many or too hard to do by hand, and you have to use a computer to approximate the solution,” he said.
It’s a hybrid of math and computer science, he said, two of his favorite subjects.
During his college career, he spent a summer working on a research project at the College of William and Mary in Virginia and a semester at Pennsylvania State University for a math program.
He achieved his goal and graduated this year from the U of A with a 4.0 grade-point average. He earned a double degree — a Bachelor of Science in math and a Bachelor of Arts in computer science. He also received the math departmental award for being an outstanding student.
Barger said it made him feel “very validated.”
“I don’t regret anything about undergrad, but I sacrificed a lot of fun stuff with my friends,” he said.
The head of the math department sent out an email about the NASA internship. Barger said he was applying for graduate schools anyway, “so I said, ‘Yeah, might as well.’”
He landed the position and spent 10 weeks at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, and returned earlier this month.
“It’s awesome,” he said of NASA.
“Basically, I wrote a bunch of software,” he said, boiling down the more-complicated explanation.
“I went to my desk and sat there for eight hours with no clocks or windows,” he said, adding that the other interns were “incredible.”
“I worked in a sweet laboratory that did a bunch of material science every day. It was a great job,” he said. “It was the best job I ever had. I was doing math all day, but people care about it.”
He leaves today for the University of Washington in Seattle, where he will live in an
apartment close to campus and work toward his doctorate in applied math.
Barger said he’d like a well-paying job someday, but that’s not what drives him.
“It’s more about research and getting the kind of job where you can contribute exciting research about a topic,” he said.
He has advice for high school students, although he tries not to lecture.
High school, for him, “was awful,” Barger said. But, if he had it to do over, he said, he would try harder.
“Your trajectory can be so based on your performance in school when you’re so volatile and you’re changing so quickly,” he said.
“There’s always going to be some obstacle that’s not fun, and you probably don’t want to do it and shouldn’t have to do it.”
Barger said Conway Junior High School drama teacher A.J. Spiridigliozzi took an interest in his well-being.
Spiridigliozzi said Barger was in one of the first classes he taught.
“You saw him and you knew: There is a really great person there. We hit it off; I really love his personality. You could tell he had all this potential. He’s just always had a big smile on his face; he was always just real excited,” Spiridigliozzi said. “He is just one of those kids I’ll never forget.”
Barger said it’s often hard for high school students to make the connection between doing well in their classes and being a success the rest of their lives.
“You’ll never regret doing well at it, even if you hated it,” he said. “It made me a different person to start doing well, and it carried over to different parts of my life.”
His self-esteem and confidence grew when he started living up to his potential, as did the opportunities he’ll have now.
“It’s never too late, but it’s harder later,” he said.
In 10 years, Barger said, he hopes to have his doctorate, “fingers crossed,” and is doing math research.
“Before the NASA experience, I was very set on being a professor. … Now, I want to have a research job but just kind of broaden my horizons. I would work for other entities other than a university,” he said.
And, he’d like to be in a band.
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.