Student profile
Explain your interest in the major you selected and describe how you have recently explored or developed this interest inside and/or outside the classroom. You may also explain how this major relates to your future career goals. If you're applying to the Division of General Studies, explain your academic interests and strengths or your future career goals. You may include any majors or areas of study you're currently considering. Limit your response to 300 to 400 words.
[Linguistics + Computer Science]
My uncle has a neurological disorder that limits his motions and prevents him from speaking. When we communicated, especially in public, verbalizing his thoughts proved difficult. I felt determined to find a solution to help him. I spent hours researching his disorder and experimented with different devices that could help him speak.
I designed a “talking glove” using an Arduino board and speech synthesizer to give a voice to people with neurological disorders. I went through countless online tutorials to learn to program in C++ and properly wire the Arduino to touch-sensitive sensors. I spent tireless nights soldering wires to the Arduino board and tweaking the code to accurately match different sensors to one of 44 phonemes of the English language so that the speaker on the glove would emit the sound of a syllable with a different touch of the glove.
Finally, at 5 am on a Thursday morning, barely awake, I tried using my “talking glove” and it worked. The glove allows a user to “say” syllables that will eventually string out words. I found the entire process of brainstorming, designing, coding, and wiring my glove very fulfilling.
I have further delved into the world of computer science by attending hackathons, developing linguistic and AI-based projects by creating algorithms, and taking courses including AP Computer Science A, AP French Language, and AP Literature and Composition, all of which have informed the projects I have undertaken.
I am excited to study Computer Science and Linguistics at UIUC because of my fascination with the two fields of study. While developing a twitter disaster-relief system using a Natural Language Processing approach, I extracted tweets from Hurricane Sandy to find what items people require during such a critical time. I loved analyzing the different languages that people use and how words and letters are interpreted differently in different contexts. I learned about the intricacies of word usage and how to create algorithms by finding probabilities of specific words preceding each other.
UIUC will prepare me for my future career as a computer scientist. I hope to continue my study of language, and further analyze how words are interpreted in different contexts. I hope to apply what I learn through UIUC’s Computer Science and Linguistics major to improve current systems such as Siri and Alexa, as well as to invent new devices to assist people who are speech impaired.
If you select a second-choice major other than the Division of General Studies on your application, write a second essay explaining your interest in this major, too. Again, limit your response to 300 to 400 words.
[Actuarial Sciences]
The sun rises in the east and sets in the west every day. This pattern is one of the few constant things in our world today that is the same as it was millions of years ago. I furthered my understanding of another important pattern, the circadian rhythm, under Professor (Name) at UC Berkeley. I loved learning about the daily biological patterns all organisms are genetically programmed to follow by parsing real-time biometric data of a study conducted on mice.
In my work, I created computational visualizations and conducted frequency analyses on the sinusoidal waves of the circadian rhythm patterns of fourteen different mice to detect signs of muscle failure. This analysis was just the first step to create a system of early diagnosis for disease prevention. Understanding these patterns motivated me to analyze a torrent of other data sets including music, Twitter tweets, and social media time stamps. I learned to utilize Python to apply to different data sets in an efficient way.
I downloaded information from Twitter of various politicians, social media influencers, scientists, and even robots to compare their activity patterns over several months. I analyzed the results and was surprised to see significant contrasts between politicians, whose rhythms were more disturbed and infrequent, compared with social media influencers, whose rhythms were generally more cyclical. By conducting statistical analyses on raw twitter data, I understood how internet usage can negatively impact sleep patterns that can eventually lead to chronological disorders later in life.
I am interested in pursuing an Actuarial Science Major in order to learn how to extract data and use analytics to understand important patterns in the real world. I am excited to use my coding skills and creativity to computationally use data to perform tasks like disease detection, climate change trajectories, and economic prediction. For example, looking at timestamps from social media postings can help predict a person’s future health risks through their sleep-wake schedule. Tracking changes in climate in the past can help us take preventative measures for the future. Anticipating the changes in the stock market could predict how investors choose to buy or sell stocks. I want to use the concepts and skills I obtain from this major to process information for an important purpose, and impact how people use the information to make decisions in their everyday lives.