[Student Profile]
GPA: 3.9
SAT/ACT: 1440/33
Academic focus/Extracurricular activities: taekwondo, internship, python
[Prompt & Essay]
Every person has a creative side, and it can be expressed in many ways: problem solving, original and innovative thinking, and artistically, to name a few. Describe how you express your creative side.
When I was younger, I took several art classes and then began painting on my own hoping to be able to express myself. I was always disappointed in my paintings because although they depicted the landscape or flowers well enough, I never moved beyond simply painting whatI saw and rarely felt that the compositions reflected my individual perspective on the subject. I concluded that maybe art wasn’t how I demonstrated my
creativity.
I have also been studying Carnatic Music--a type of South Indian classical music--for many years. For most of that time, I was learning and repeating songs with minimal variations of my own. Again, it lacked my personality and so, music too fell through as my creative outlet.
Slowly, I began to realize that I don’t have to be good at art or music to be creative. I feel most creative and innovative when I’m solving problems. When I find a different way to solve a math proof, I feel original and inspired to discover more solutions. Another of my creative outlets is robotics, where I enjoy finding simpler ways to build mechanisms. For example, we needed our robot to hang off a bar and had made a scissor liftto extend a hook and lift the robot. When that failed, I proposed attaching the hook to a rope the robot could climb up. My teammates and I built a winch so the robot could climb up the rope. Our team leader wanted to velcro up the slack in a complicated manner, but I suggested we simply put the slack in a canister, which worked quite well.
I have learned that creativity is so much more than a painting, a song, or looking at problems from a different angle. I want to explore the field of bioengineering and find new ways to approach reconstructive procedures and de-differentiate somatic cells so they act like stem cells and regenerate tissues. Creativity can be expressed in many forms, and I intend to save lives while expressing mine.