Undergraduate / I will try to elaborate on why I would make a good roommate; Stanford Supplement [6]

Prompt: Virtually all of Stanford's undergraduates live on campus. Write a note to your future roommate that reveals something about you or that will help your roommateïand usïknow you better.

My essay: (2000 characters max)

Since I have never had a roommate before, my perception of what it's like to live with myself may be slightly distorted, but I will try to elaborate on why I would make a good roommate.

The most defining property of me as a roommate is that I am easy to talk to. There is little I am not interested in, and I'm great to talk to about literature, science, mathematics, philosophy, politics, history and languages. I am impossible to offend, very easy-going, and since I speak English, German, Hebrew and Russian and understand most Romanic languages, there is a good chance that my roommate and me won't have a hard time conversing in their native language if it happens not to be English.

Furthermore, I produce very little noise, for I do not usually listen to music while working. Since I like staying up until late at night, waking up late, and generally am more of a nocturnal type of person, I guess that's a quite relevant property of mine. It also attributes to the fact that I can easily ensure the absence of sleep-impeding mosquitoes at night. I feel obliged to also mention that I have a slight aversion to spiders, and prefer to "take care" of those in my proximity ï with as little complaining as my arachnophobia permits.

Lastly, I would like to say that I am a very humorous person and I love joking. While some people told me that they don't know whether or not I'm being serious half of the time, I can but hope that this is not too bad, especially considering that the other people I talked with deemed the former ones as lacking a sense of humor. One minor quirk of mine is that sometimes, I might have a hard time to stop laughing, but other than that, I think I am a person that is easy to live with ï keeping in mind, of course, the objectivity I can or cannot maintain while judging myself.

Any ideas how to improve it and on whether it's appropriate for Stanford?

Undergraduate / 'specializing in different realms' -Stanford paper - Intellectual Vitality [2]

When the results of the final exams were announced at my school, it turned out that I had won the prize for the best Abitur exam in mathematics, which covered a trip to SaarbrĂźcken, where the annual convention of the German Mathematical Society took place this year. Many internationally renowned mathematicians were invited to that convention to give speeches on recent discoveries and theories in their respective areas of expertise. The topics very highly diverse, including the computation of Navier-Stokes-Fokker-Planck systems, image processing, machine learning and arbitrage.

I've had always known Socrates' statement, "I know that I know nothing", to be true; however, it did not quite prepare me for the complexity of the speeches: while the lectures offered a vague outline of the solutions to the challenges they dealt with to the uninitiated, attempting to truly grasp the involved theories demanded a lot of work. The fact that even professors who happened to specialize in different realms admitted to not understanding everything offered little solace.

Nonetheless, the humbling experience did not put me off my interest in mathematics. On the contrary, I experienced a huge diversity of highly interesting areas to potentially specialize in, and met some fellow aspiring mathematicians, who, like me, maintained their tenacity and ambitions rather than be intimidated by the sheer extent and complexity of mathematics.

The convention has demonstrated very palpably the ever-present trade-off between depth and breadth of knowledge. That trade-off does not mean, however, that one should sacrifice one for the other. On the contrary, a broad range of interests means that there are many enticing areas to gain deep knowledge in. Possessing both deep and broad knowledge is highly helpful in finding interdisciplinary relations, and thus eases the advancement of one discipline by utilizing experience gained from another.