Undergraduate / 'three of them clogged' - MIT Essay - Challenge [3]

I would thank anyone that helps to improve and cut down this essay.I am going to be uploading my essays here, so if you can take a look at them too in the next days it would be awesome.

Tell us about the most significant challenge you've faced or something important that didn't go according to plan. How did you manage the situation?(*) (200-250 words)

"There are four arteries that irrigate to the heart. My father has three of them clogged."
This was all I could think as my mom and I entered the hospital the night before my dad's surgery. It was also the first time I crossed the doors to the ICU, the place where my father had stayed several times for the last four months. It all had begun when, while driving, his sight got clouded, his breath shortened and his chest started screaming.

"Listen," my mother took my by the shoulders so her eyes meet with mine. "The night visits are from 9:00 to 9:30 p.m. Only three people are allowed. Separately, that is. And only legals. You know what we're doing, right?" I nodded. "You're going first". She helped me get into a gown and a muffler, explained me how to get to my father's bed, and only then, let me go.

It's funny how I was fifteen years old but took an adults-only tour, while all those other times he was hospitalized and I stayed at grandma's no one gave me the facts straight.

The lights on that zone of the hospital were brighter, but at the same time there were more shadows. The next day, early on the morning, my father was going to close his eyes and I needed to find him. Doctors passed me, busy, nurses made their errands and sick patients waited on every corner. I thought I wasn't going to make it, that I was a lost child. But then, only a few steps away, I saw him in the same exact moment he saw me, and he smiled at me.

Undergraduate / Math Olympians are the Monster group of sporadic groups - Perfectly Content [7]

Describe a place or environment where you are perfectly content. What do you do or experience there, and why is it meaningful to you?

I stomped, she slid, he hopped, and above us, the stars were shining vividly, like you could trace an Eulerian path going across them. Having completed the last exam and satisfied our hunger, we were ready to stay up all night. But when we reached the front of our room, the other girl and I turned our eyes upon each other, waiting for the other to open, so we redirected our hopes to our guy friend.

"Don't look at me. This isn't my room. This is the girl's room."

He was fooling with us. He had in his possession a set of keys to enter to our room whenever he felt like it, but on other occasions that we had forgotten ours (yeah, it happened more than once) he didn't want to have anything to do with us. Entering through the window wasn't an issue for us -we were experienced-, but this time, though, we noticed that the other girl was inside, having what sounded like an important chat with her friend, so we decided not to bother them (we may have knocked and they didn't open, I honestly don't remember).

We sat on the floor, backs against walls, with nowhere else to go. In front of us were the walls that served as base for our hide and seek games and the benches where we crowded together and watch the world go by.

"Hey," I said. "How did you solve the problem one of the exam today?"

Faster than you can say "infinite descent" our backpacks were zipped open, paper sheets were spread in the floor, and with compass, pen and ruler on our hands, we began sketching.

"For homothety here, the orthocenter..."
"Considering the perpendicular bisectors..."
"Using the lemma, this is the incenter and..."

It was an easy problem, certainly not the most controversial of the exam, and everyone had solved it.
We caught the attention of the passers-by, who approached us when they recognized the drawing: "What are you doing?"
"We are trying to decide which solution is the prettiest," we replied. And so, they became judges too.

You may be wondering where this place filled with mathematical youth came from. You see, after the 2012 Mexican Mathematical Olympiad, the set of all x, such that x is a Gold medalist or belongs to the intersection of Silver medalists and Contestants that can still participate next year, are invited to four, ten-day long math sessions on different parts of the country. We call them the National Trainings. I used a scholarship to pay for them because my state has lost its funding, a decision that was criticized by my community. They think I only did exams and learnt "math stuff" but they don't know about the rest. That I was famous for solving a combinatory problem using a polygon (I even won a nickname). Or that I once stole the football from a guy than runs like a gazelle (he stole it back, but it's still the biggest achievement of my brief soccer career). Or that I stopped being the same after my friend moved a rare Magic card closer to the window so I could see it, and moonlight fell on it and surrounded it and brought it alive (the lights were off because my roomies were sleeping).

Math Olympians are the Monster group of sporadic groups: we have an order fifty-four digits long and there are no subgroups. We are meant to visit the math world together; that's something I discovered that night.

Undergraduate / Cultural background/Pleasure/Department/Ethical Dilemma; 3 MIT & 1 Caltech [NEW]

MIT
This is the worst of them. I don't get "cultural background" at all. I didn't write false thing, but I don't know what they want to hear in this question.

Please tell us more about your cultural background and identity in the space below (100 word limit). If you need more than 100 words, please use the Optional section on Part 2.

When you live on a frontier state and have USA as your head and the rest of Mexico as your tail, strange things happen. If you're a child, Santa Claus comes to town on December 25th and the three Magic Kings on January 7th. If you're a teenager, Halloween becomes appealing, so you dress up on October 31st, but on November 2nd you share a slice of Bread of the Dead and hot cocoa with your family. And if you're me, you have the latest models of gadgets and handmade pottery dishes, all resting on your desk.

We know you lead a busy life, full of activities, many of which are required of you. Tell us about something you do simply for the pleasure of it.

My brother collects coins; I collect stories. Sometimes it happens that I read or hear one, it gets stored in my head, and eventually I find myself rambling about it and no one is able to shut me up: making of movies, cake pops, Google entrance-exam questions. I can recite full episodes of my favorite TV show and plots of retro videogames only few people remaining know about. Others are starred by transcendental numbers and take place in the 1.89 dimension. I can even tell you stories about MIT, my favorite involving a certain console called the TX-0.

Although you may not yet know what you want to major in, which department or program at MIT appeals to you and why?
When you're programming or doing math, "you're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas". You may create lines of code and operate on numbers but, in the end, they are like books; they are small windows to other worlds that we don't even know what they look like. This is why I want to pursue a major in Mathematics with Computer Science and a minor in Literature: these three areas are closer than we think, and I know MIT will aid me in my mission to make people see it.

[bCaltech[/b]
I think this one sucks too. I spent a lot of time on it and it probably isn't an ethical dilemma.

Members of the Caltech community live, learn, and work within an Honor System with one simple guideline; "No member shall take unfair advantage of any other member of the Caltech community." While seemingly simple, questions of ethics, honesty and integrity are sometimes challenging. Share an ethical dilemma that has challenged you. How did you respond? Your response is not limited to academic situations

After hitting "send", I felt liberated. I had broken three years of silently bearing his secret. I could have made me forget it, but I could picture him, unable to sleep because no one knew except for me, and I had walked away. I decided to show him I'm not the same. Back then I was convinced he was lying, that he wasn't going against his parents and religion. And now, all I wanted was to log in the next day, check my messages, and had one from him. I wanted "It's never too late" to be true.

Undergraduate / "Let your life speak."/ extracurricular activities or work experiences [7]

There is a Quaker saying: "Let your life speak." Describe the environment in which you were raised-your family, home, neighborhood or community-and how it influenced the person you are today. (Required length 200-250 words)

My grandma says that my family's house is what happens when both parents work double shift every day. However, having spent a lifetime in it, I opine it is more than that. My house is what happens when your mom conserves her childhood belongings deep into her adulthood, when your dad can get fixated on even a paper clip, and when your brother is fond of ordering online from distant countries.

Whenever I visited other houses as a child, I felt like I was stepping on a parallel universe. There were similarities between others' houses and mine, like beige-colored walls and south-facing windows but, from then on, everything else was unfamiliar. The books stood side by side on the shelf, vertically, and not on top of each other, horizontally. Power switches never popped out of their site. Unopened boxes of outdoors lights and camera rockets weren't part of the decoration. And even though I looked for one everywhere, I could never find it; I could never found a corner where rare rocks collected from family trips were kept.

Nevertheless, even at that age I knew I preferred my house because, how could I use my pottery wheel in an entrance hallway that always needed to be neat? How could I conduct ecological research in a garden with cropped grass? And now, I think: What other family, different from the one that made this house what it is, would stand eating in a table covered in my math writings?

Please briefly elaborate on one of your extracurricular activities or work experiences. (150 word limit.)
The girl asked me her question in the middle of the dinosaurs' video playing. She tapped at my knee to make me notice her since I was absorbed, watching.

"Do you know... why they aren't here anymore?"
That was when the rest of the kids focused on me too; their face with the stare from when they wanted us volunteers to read them a book, and paint stains courtesy of art class.

I begin nodding, but then stopped. I half-nodded.
"Is it true that a giant rock came from space and squashed them?"
I smiled, and suddenly knew exactly what to do. I told them stories, about furious volcanoes and moving continents, about red skies and raised dust, about coldness and a Sun to not be seen anywhere. The meteorite, which they kept asking about, came last.

"And so, how do the dinosaurs extinguished?"
"That's a mystery." I answered.

NOTE: Is it alright if I talk about a volunteer experience in this essay?
Thank you so much!

Undergraduate / The Mountains - Tufts essay, what makes you happy? [NEW]

B. What makes you happy?
"Just one more time", I pleaded. My parents rolled their eyes, already wanting to leave, but nodded.
I took off the skis and began to climb; this time, higher than any of the others. My brother didn't join me. He was done with skiing after he had landed on a stranger. Once I reached the desired height, I positioned myself. I looked at the snowed landscape around me, heard the wind drowning every other sound, and let myself fall.

After that, we went home to the city we belong to, where it's summer all day long, where the trees hardly know rain, let alone snow, and where the air is sometimes so suffocating that you have to breathe through your mouth. With everyday that passes our trip seems farer and farer and the snow, the forest, and the fresh air slowly become inconceivable to us again. But when I close my eyes while I am swinging on a swing, or when I run as fast as I can along a downhill road, or when I ride my bicycle in those few and far between moments in which the street in front of our house is empty, none of these things matter anymore. I remember the mountains, and I feel happy.

Undergraduate / Universum Mexico, Dictionary, Catholic and Atheist - Stanford essays [3]

Stanford students possess an intellectual vitality. Reflect on an idea or experience that has been important to your intellectual development. (250 word limit.)
In 2011 I visited a museum in Mexico City called Universum with a group of other kids from my state. For one of the activities we organized in pairs; each of us had a long rope whose ends were tied around our wrists, like handcuffs, and that was looped around our partners'. That way, we were tied together and the objective of the game, then, was to get ourselves apart.

My partner and I attempted the same things than the other couples: ducking under the rope and stepping over it. All of these options failed and suddenly all other ideas have run out. At that moment, we gathered around the museum guides who showed us the way to separate while relating the game to topology, an area of mathematics none of us have heard about before. Although we were excited about the knowledge we have just acquired, we were more frustrated. The solution had been there all along, we only had to let ourselves see it!

After this experience I became an amateur topologist: I read friendly and illustrated proofs of the Poincare's Conjecture, call a donut a torus, and tie my shoelaces with a trefoil knot. I even aspire to be a real topologist one day, but on the meantime, I am committed to spreading over the world the wonders of the mathematics of distortion, by telling anyone willing to hear the secrets of higher dimensions and challenging them with the same puzzle that beat us all that time.

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 roommate -- and us -- know you better. (250 word limit.)

Dear roommate:
I am sending you a dictionary that I believe would be of use for you in the years that come, but don't be afraid to give it whatever use you want (as a paperweight, perhaps?).

Cheesebration. n. You, me, and a meal including cheese in any of its forms. What do you say?
Coyota. n. The most representative dessert of my state par excellence, and one of the sweetest things you're ever going to taste. Don't worry, as my roommate, you'll receive a special treatment when it comes to coyotas.

Dar el tonto. vi. You know that feeling? When you are with someone that gets you completely and out of nowhere you two begin to laugh with the kind of laugh that makes your stomach and your cheeks hurt, and everything than any of you say makes you laugh even harder? I've known it many times, but the one in which my brother and I made our "Koala in the Tower of Tokyo" movie surpasses them all.

Wiles. n. I always wanted a porcupine, but my mother is inflexible when it comes to pets in the house, so I got the closest non-animal thing to a porcupine there is: a cactus! Wiles take his name from Andrew Wiles, a mathematician I'll let you investigate about, if you don't know who he is yet. I hope Wiles and you get along just fine and that there are no spiky confrontations between the two of you.

What matters to you, and why? (250 word limit.)
My mother is a devoted catholic and my father, a skeptic atheist. I grew up under their differing ways of seeing the world and, for a long time, I didn't know how I saw the world myself. I used to think that I was following both of the paths they have put up in front of me and that I would never be able to choose when, in reality, I had not been following either, but instead had been floating amidst the two all along. And now, I know what I am. I am hopeful. Hope is what matters to me.

What my mother is faithfully praying for, I can only hope for it. When my father says there's nothing out there listening, I tell him that hope doesn't need listeners. Hope is universal and I think it is part of each of our souls, even if we can live our entire lives without knowing that we're hoping or what we're hoping for.

In my case, I don't hope for the world to be perfect, but I hope for the future, and trying to give a meaning to my past experiences is what gives me this hope. It may not secure me that everything will be alright, that I will get a happy ending, but it reassures me about me not living my life blindly, and I find that more important. As my favorite cartoonist, Charles M. Schulz, said "A whole stack of memories never equal one little hope."

(on that last sentence, do I have to begin the quote with capital letters?)
Please, any commentary, critique and suggestion is welcomed, and if you could also check my other essays below, it would be great. Thanks a million!

Writing Feedback / Boston Leadership Institute (spelling and grammar) [2]

I don't think that this is going to be too difficult or take a lot of time. Mainly, I need help to see if it is correctly written. Is for an application to a summer program, and the instructions read:

Students or parents may fill out the application below. A sentence or two for the open-response sections is fine. Please do not write essays.
I am afraid that at some parts is going to be dull and at others is going to be too essayish. Overall, what can be improved?

Thank you!

What type of grades (are you)/(is the student) receiving in school? ...in science and math? *

I have achieved a grade of 95 or higher over 100 in most of my classes, and I consistently ranked among the Top 3 students in my former school (my actual school doesn't rank). Science and Math courses are the ones I performed better at, having obtained 100 in each Math class every semester and 97-100 in biology and chemistry classes.

(Are you)/(Is the student) taking or planning to take any advanced, honors, IB, or Advanced Placement courses? Please list examples. *

Being from a small school in Mexico, I don't have a say on what I study at school, nor the choices above are offered here. However, I don't let this to keep me from learning and knowing about my interests. I completed the Kumon Program when I was in tenth grade, which covers topics in calculus and statistics; and after my current school told me they wouldn't be able to gave me a Physics class the fall of my senior year, I signed up for one online. I have also completed a course in Android Programming (coursera) and I recently joined one on Fundamentals of Neuroscience (edX).

What is (your)/(the student's) interest level in math and science and, specifically, in STEM programs at the Boston Leadership Institute? This is a three-week program. Please speak to the ability to make a three week commitment to research. *

I am a Math Olympiad competitor. Problems have been my companion since sixth grade and I've looked up to mathematicians that had schizophrenia and then went on to win the Nobel or that were speculated to have Asperger's Syndrome by the press after they rejected a one million dollar prize. I have trained for sixteen hours straight and have been stuck with a problem other days more, so I am not afraid to say that I can do the same sacrifice for other kind of problems too, like the ones I would face at the Boston Leadership Institute. Specially, the Summer program of Clinical Psychology would not only introduce me to research, something I never thought I would be able to engage in before going to college, but I believe that by attending, with all the things I would learnt and see and experience there, I would have all the tools that I need to start making a change in a community misinformed about mental illness.

Any other comments? Career goals or extracurricular activities or awards might be mentioned here.
My achievements in the most meaningful extracurricular activities to me are: (then I include a list)