Student profile
Describe an example of your leadership experience in which you have positively influenced others, helped resolve disputes, or contributed to group efforts overtime.
During the freshman club rush, I eagerly sought out Math Club, tucked behind large banners from more popular clubs. I wanted to extend my passion for math into a team setting. Over the next three years, I focused on developing the club and expanding its reach. I built the club website, started weekly meetings, researched agenda topics, explained complex competition problems, and wrote tests to select teams for math competitions. The club evolved from a fledgling group of eleven members to a vibrant community of thirty-six math enthusiasts. Math Club became a popular feature in the school magazine, with headlines like, "first Troy team to win the Orange Coast College competition since 1972", "fourth place at Math-Day-at-the-Beach", and "23rd in the Caltech-Harvey-Mudd-Math-Competition". Many teachers congratulated us on our achievements. Suddenly, Math Club became a cool place to hangout!
This year, I formed and trained a team to participate in the [name] Mathematical Modeling Challenge in order to raise awareness of various real-world applications of math. We met after school for four months to prepare for this grueling contest. Between boba and pizza slices, we practiced various sample problems. The day of the contest--a Saturday in early March--the five of us met at my house. The continuous 14 hour marathon started at 8am, with almost no time to eat or rest while solving the problem. Soon it was 10pm and the contest was over; we hi-fived each other, feeling accomplished just to have gone through the experience. Our placement in the top 20% in the nation helped spark a new interest within the club.
The math club experience has transformed me from an individual achiever to a contributor in others' success. Through my responsibility to effectively engage an eager group of students every week, encourage new freshmen to learn advanced topics in math, and develop future leaders by assigning them board positions and helping them tackle the additional duties, I found myself as a collaborator, supporter and a friend.
Describe how you have taken advantage of a significant educational opportunity or worked to overcome an educational barrier you have faced.
Summer of [year], I was introduced to the world of cancer research at the UC-Irvine- COSMOS program. I lived in the UCI dorms for a month, researching the effects of agents like lactic acid on various gene expressions in mouse fibroblasts. My initial lack of knowledge in Chemistry was made up by hours of studies everyday. I learned to use MATLAB for building computational models of possible cancer therapies. On the final day, when I shared my past one month's experience at the poster session, I realized that my future would surely have research in it.
The following summer, I reached out to Dr. [name of professor] my mentor from the COSMOS program, who still remembered me! Through the summer I developed a mathematical model of the growth of tumors that employ the reverse Warburg effect. After summer, I continued to explore spatial modeling of the growth of different populations of cells and their interactions, by using Python and CompuCell3D.
During the school year, I also worked under Dr. [name of professor] at UCI Cognitive Sciences. I learned to express real life scenarios like decision making and the optimal stopping problem through algorithmic certainty. This is when I dove into machine learning, which would help with my next research project.
This summer, I was selected for the City of Hope Roberts Academy research program in the mathematical oncology department under [name of professor]. Everything I learned so far came together here, as I explored the ability of physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) to capture the dynamics of nonlinear systems defined by partial differential equations. I've extended the application of this model to predict the evolution of reaction-diffusion of the brain, particularly for glioblastoma.
I'm thankful to the professors and postdoc fellows who have mentored me through these years. My research experience has shown me real life implementations of what I learn in books. The last three years have been a sometimes frustrating and yet exhilarating experience to understand the scourge of cancer. My experience with these brilliant minds in academia has raised me to embody perseverance and dedication towards solving a universal problem like cancer.
Think about an academic subject that inspires you. Describe how you have furthered this interest inside and/or outside of the classroom.
Ever since childhood, I've loved playing basketball. Alley-oop, three-pointer, lay-up--it was game-on 24 hours a day. As I grew older, I wanted to find out what made certain shots better and some players more efficient. I created spreadsheets tracking scoring statistics, probabilities of making shots from particular locations, game-IQ, and other factors contributing towards predicting players' performance. Equipped with this data, I annually drafted my fantasy basketball teams. This was my first exposure to applying math in real life. Soon, math became the most favorite part of my curriculum and also an engaging pastime. Over the next few years I learned advanced concepts in Combinatorics, Number Theory, Probability and other topics from books like Art of Problem Solving, as I got hooked into competition math. I came in the top 15 in the state Mathcounts tournament. I received distinction in various math olympiad competitions. I also participated in the year- long preparations representing the Southern California team for the national ARML competition.
About four years ago, I sustained a severe head injury which not only led to many visits to the neurologist but also piqued my interest in the application of math in physiology. I obsessively watched Youtube videos on how different organs communicate to enable life, fascinated with the possibilities of predicting disease prognosis through mathematical modeling, big data analysis and machine learning (ML). Over the past three years I self-studied Python and MATLAB, learned Linear Algebra and Differential Equations, completed Stanford's online course in ML and MIT's BeaverWorks course on the application of ML in medicine. I've applied this knowledge to build mathematical models on targeted cancer therapy, explored conditions contributing towards tumor survival, and developed a neural network to predict the evolution of a reaction-diffusion model of the brain to apply for glioblastoma.
My journey with math has progressed from an early introduction through sports to adventuring into regional and national competitions and eventually finding my niche in research. Math has inspired me to explore novel ways of collecting data about our body and discovering patterns in the resulting datasets to address difficult human health issues.
What have you done to make your school or your community a better place?
My love for math has taken me to several competitions across many places over the years. A common theme I've noticed is that the same schools, usually from richer neighborhoods, triumph in these competitions. Rarely have I seen a student from an unknown school in the winners podium. I realized that, despite our free secondary school system, there is a huge divide when it comes to advancing one's academic skills beyond what is taught in the classroom. I started looking for ways to help students whose limited means might hinder them from receiving proper guidance for math competition problems.
I took this desire to the OC-Launch organization, a nonprofit where highschool students come together to take entrepreneurial initiatives. Here, I co-launched [name], a unique non-profit free and interactive peer-to-peer online tutoring service for underserved students where I simulcasted to 100+ students, preparing them for Math Olympiad competitions. We extended our mission's reach by securing a $5000 grant from the Dragon Kim Fellowship and pitching our idea at the Diamond Challenge 2019. As the Co-President of OC-Launch, I helped fellow tech-evangelists build their own ventures for social benefit through fund-raising, organizing business workshops and volunteer recruitment drives, and marketing for organization events. Increasing community outreach and access to educational resources became my mission.
I've continued this passion through my involvement in [city] Math Club (SAMC). Here, I've connected with younger children from underprivileged backgrounds for whom even a little help can make a big difference in reaching their educational aspirations. Through their experiences at SAMC, many students were motivated to join the Peer-Genius sessions and subsequently appear for the AMC (American Mathematics Contest) exams. Seeing these middle-school students making an effort despite adversity, coming to SAMC just for the opportunity to learn math, is truly humbling. Helping a sixth-grader solve an algebraic equation for the first time or draw a circle and measure its circumference, I feel proud to have contributed to a more positive future for our society.
I hope to utilize my education at UC to continue serving towards creating a level playing field for everyone across society.