What is the one thing that you think sets you apart from other candidates applying to the University of California?
In stunned horror, I stared at the blank screen. All my CAD and Sketchup plans had disappeared. A computer glitch. Tomorrow, the last day of my summer architecture internship, I was going to make my final presentation to the firm’s senior architects. I looked at the clock. 10 PM. A whole month’s work to be re-done in one night? The panic gave way to one single thought: I must finish this!
By 7 AM, I had it done. My house designs were ready with no trace of the previous disaster in the work. This laser-like focus is what sets me apart from my peers.
Take my long-distance running. March 2015. I had signed up to run 10K in the Hyderabad Pinkathon (India’s biggest women’s run for breast cancer). The 108-degrees Fahrenheit was enough to make one feel like a blister. “Don’t,” well-wishers said. They warned that 10K in an Indian summer was not for a 16-year old. But my feet were determined to fly. I had not known my aunt who died from breast cancer before I was born. But the petite woman in my father’s album was real to me through family stories, and so was her cause. I came 9th among the hundreds of women who ran.
“Focused” describes my reading habits. “Difficult writer, disturbing plot,” my mother said when I casually thumbed through John Coetzee’s Disgrace on her desk. It sounded like a challenge. Both her statements were true, I realized the next day after having devoured the book nonstop. The story of a fallen academic and a racialized rape in post-apartheid South Africa had consumed me.
But there is also play to my purpose. My focus lets me see intricate things of beauty.
I have seen light playing with the leaves on the tops of trees, I have seen it caress the water drops on grass in the morning, trapping little rainbows in them, and I have seen how light streams through a window in a golden dance of with dust particles. Focus at work. Focus at play. Focus defines me.