As senior Rory Akin opens his closet, he’s not met with a typical array of clothes or dusty boxes. Instead, he sees his array of periodic elements — ranging from copper to radioactive uranium — all tucked safely within the shelves. Staring at the results of his hard work after years of searching for and purchasing these elements, he gleams at them with pride.

Collecting is a hobby that often starts at a young age, whether it’s rocks, coins or stuffed animals. For Akin, he said he started collecting elements about five years ago.

“I don’t remember exactly how I got into it, but I’ve been very into science for pretty much my entire life,” Akin said. “I managed to get my hands on some element samples, and it just snowballed from there.”

So far, Akin said his most prized item in his collection is his uranium.

“My one gram of nearly pure uranium metal, which I think is around 99.9% pure, is my pride and joy,” Akin said. “I think it was legal, but I got it from a somewhat sketchy website sold by an element collector. It’s really hard to get radioactive samples, and uranium is one of the only ones you can get legally that’s radioactive.”

Beyond Akin’s metals, card collectibles can be just as rare and costly. 

“A pack of Pokemon cards, especially nowadays, is like $10 per and you get 10 cards each,” senior Aiden Chen said. “I think I have a bare minimum of 1000 cards in my drawers, so it’s quite a lot.”

Senior William Tu said he started collecting stuffed animals in kindergarten and has continued to accumulate them.

“A lot of the time I get them as gifts, but sometimes I like to go out and buy them,” Tu said. “I recently went to San Francisco with some of my friends, and I got a penguin from Daiso.”

Unlike stuffed animals — where you can commonly find in most stores locally — Akin said the hardest part of being an element collector, along with the danger and cost, is finding rarer elements.

“It’s really hard to find a bunch of relatively pure samples for some specific elements,” Akin said. “Like you can get copper every day, but the ones that took me quite a while to find on web websites were osmium and, of course, the uranium. It’s just really hard to find them, because not a whole lot of people are going, ‘Hey, you know what I want today? I would like to get one gram of a platinum group metal that no one uses except for pen nibs.’”

Through his collection, Akin said he has bonded with his dad.

“My dad thinks it is great,” Akin said. “He’s contributed a large amount of the samples I have. He’s into STEM too, and he had some tangentially related stuff that has now been passed down to me.”

For Chen, he said his Pokemon cards also have built relationships with his peers.

“It allows me and my friends (to have) something to talk about, something to show off to each other, and, to a lesser extent, play the actual Pokemon (trading card) game,” Chen said. “I think I got an adequate amount of utility and joy out of whatever I bought. And also getting that rare pull is always just an amazing feeling.”

Tu said though he probably cannot bring his entire collection to his college, he hopes to keep at least some of them in his dorm room.

“It’s physically a burden to bring all the stuffed animals to college, especially since I should try to save space, but I think I’ll start a new collection, or bring some of the smaller stuffed animals that are hand size, like the plushies or key chains,” Tu said.

As he leaves for college, Akin hopes to continue to grow his element collection.

“I’m going to try to get as much of the periodic table as I can, but I’m not going to be able to make any significant steps until I get a job,” Akin said. “It’s not legal, healthy or possible to collect all the elements, but I want to get all the ones that it’s reasonable for me to collect.”

Akin also said his collection represents his future aspirations. 

“I’m going to be majoring in physics, and I hope to go into nuclear physics.” Akin said “Getting into chemistry was the start of the road that led me there, and so it’s very meaningful to me.”

Looking at his collection now, Chen said his Pokemon cards serve as a nostalgic reminder of his childhood and happy memories.

“I think nowadays it’s more of a reminder of my old, now-sort-of-foreign child-like innocence, where I just collected cards for the sake of collecting cards, not because I’m addicted to gambling or because I wanted to get the rarest thing, but because I liked Pokemon,” Chen said.

While Chen’s interest in collecting physical Pokemon cards has gradually faded over the years, he still engages in online Pokemon games.

“I don’t think I’ll go back to collecting physical cards,” Chen said, “I don’t feel the need to have physical merchandise, but I think with the new mobile game — the Trading Card Game pocket, which is just literally a mobile version of the game where you don’t have to spend money to get packs and get cards — it definitely helps me get back into collecting again.”