What would you say is your greatest talent or skill? How have you developed and demonstrated that talent over time?
Although family lore says that I sketched plans of houses when I was three, my earliest memory is when I stayed up to make a model house with paper and scotch tape for show-and-tell in Kindergarten. I still remember the surprised delight on the face of my teacher, Mrs. Bouwens, when she saw what I had made. For my 2nd and 3rd-grade classmates in Chapel Hill, NC, I made paper camera-models and small card-paper boxes. More ambitious in 5th grade, I fashioned a house out of a discarded cardboard carton--it even had a draw-down staircase leading up to an attic.
This instinctive inclination toward design has grown with me through high school. During my 9th grade, the leading Indian architect, Golak Khandual, was engaged to design our new school building. I requested and got an opportunity to work with Golak. I interviewed students, teachers, and staff across the school, and made a presentation to the entire school about how the new building could blend the different visions of these people. I spent the summer after 10th grade experimenting in photography using my father’s iPhone. I captured the North Carolina sun playing with flowers and trees and stained glass—offering lessons for building design.
But the most exciting phase in my growth toward architecture came in the summer after my 11th grade. Although I did not know him, I approached [name], the Director of Design at FountainHead Design (an international architecture firm based in Hyderabad) for an internship. After a 2-hour meeting/interview, he decided I could work with them. It was the most valuable two months of my life—I learned architectural techniques, observed the way architects work, trained in the latest CAD software, and even designed a small house on my own! Mathan emailed my parents: “I felt she had a lot more motivation than even graduate students.” In my senior year, I am taking two college courses in architecture. Now I believe that architecture is in my bones. It has become the soul of my dreams.