Describe two or three of your current intellectual interests and why they are exciting to you. Why will Cornell's College of Arts and Sciences be the right environment in which to pursue your interests? (Please limit your response to 650 words.)
Growing up in a family of software engineers in the [city], I was exposed to the power of computer science relatively early. At the age of 10, I started learning how to code, reading the various books on programming strewn around the house, even though I could hardly understand them. I discovered the joy behind thinking analytically to solve logical problems, and over the years computer science grew from an interest buzzing in the background to my primary intellectual pursuit. The fact that any practical problem can be solved with computers after multiple iterations of solutions is what has attracted me so much to computer science, which has in turn, spawned interests in two other academic areas: linguistics and biology.
Over the years, I have become fascinated with the development of language and its use as a tool for spreading information and fostering unity between different individuals. Familiarizing myself with the odd semantic structures of some of the newer programming languages in high school sparked a curiosity about the human languages they were modeled after. My time volunteering at my local healthcare center further exposed me to the power of languages - as I read to toddlers who were just learning to speak, I witnessed firsthand the power of language in communicating virtually any thought or idea from person to person, as well as the level of knowledge and understanding the use of language enabled access to.
The student organizations at Cornell will offer the environment for me to specialize and combine my interests in computer science and linguistics. For example, the Cornell Data Science Club’s activities are very exciting to me, especially one of their past projects involving data mining to parse handwritten digits into machine-readable code. The Cornell UnderLings club will also be a place where I can discuss and explore my interests in modeling human lingual communication patterns in robotic platforms.
At the [university]Biomedical Research Academy program, I learned about one of the most important applications of computer science: biology. I learned how software is used to track, manage, and extrapolate from the mountains of data collected from biological systems. I began to read more about biology itself, and became fascinated with the numerous biological systems, such as neural networks, which operate in the same way as a microprocessor in a computer, using millions of on/off switches. The application of my area of expertise, computer science, to understanding the complexity of biotic systems and their similarity with computer networks has captivated my interest since then. I became even more intrigued by this concept when I worked a on a research project at the Stanford Information Sciences in Imaging lab, focusing on improving medical image search functionality, leveraging user input over multiple iterations, combining biological human thought and computer-implemented algorithms to improve search result relevancy.
With the well-equipped Cornell Computational Linguistics and Bioinformatics labs, I will have the tools to perform further study in my specific interests at CAS. Additionally, Dr. Ross Knepper’s research at Cornell in human-computer interaction is extremely relevant to my interests in machine learning. I have reached out to him to learn more about his research in this field; I would love to explore research opportunities in his lab.
Although I am certainly no stranger to adrenaline rushes like that from the infamous gorge diving, simply living and bonding with others in places like the skylounges and Fuertes Observatory in Jameson Hall during cold Ithaca winters would let me establish an invaluable camaraderie with my fellow scholars.
The Cornellian culture, and the well-known strength of Cornell’s computer science, biology, and linguistics departments, have made CAS my first choice school; I will have the freedom, resources, and support to find that one open niche overlapping my three interests, in which I can make my own contributions. I look forward to one day placing an object of my own atop the Cornell clocktower.