Scholarship /
Scholarship essay open topic for engineering - Puzzle Pieces [2]
hello! this essay is for a HK uni that I really want to get into so any insight on whether the flow is right or where i can add more information is valuable. Please help a fellow mate out.useful information which supports your application
Please provide below any useful information which supports your application for an entry scholarship from ****. This application for entry scholarship will not be processed if you do not enter anything below before you submit your application.Tick. Tick. Tick.
It's been five and a half hours already. The soreness in my wrists and throbbing pain in the neck can sometimes be a better indicator of the time. I continue scuffing my stylus on the worn-out drawing tablet. Despite scratches embellishing on every centimetre of the tablet, it works just as good. Turning the brush down's opacity, I add the last bits of shadows underneath the hair, a touch of white to make the eyes glimmer better and a handful of strokes on the earring to make the metal shinier. I zoom out the canvas to take a last quick look at the painting before frustration takes over and I set to fix all the details that are only somehow visible to my eyes - five times have been enough. As I try to turn my head, I am reminded again of the stiffness in my neck. Maybe next time take a more extended deadline.
Doing portrait commissions isn't always fun and games, especially on a tight schedule. Still, it pays more, and even if my parents continually tell me to focus on my studies, appreciation is evident in their eyes.
However, the real incentive is just not being able to help. When I push myself away to look at the hours worth fusion of strokes of paint and CTRL-Z, I find the painting staring back at me like a real entity - no longer just an idea existing in my mind. It's this fascinating feeling of being able to create that makes me want to sit back on the chair and dive into that five and a half hours again.
With my life being compartmentalised for the better part of it, there was little time for anything else than school, grades, home; rinse and repeat. Information being memorised only to be forgotten after dumping all of it in the exam; my mid-tier school was monotonous at best.
Art had been my only scope at exploration. It granted me the ability to turn the blank canvas into a gateway of my ideas to the world. I fell in love with creating, be it with pencils and paints or clays or cardboard.
Alongside discovering and mixing new pigments and working on composition and technique, I learned one crucial thing was dismantling a complex structure to its fundamental shapes. The apples to the human skull were just circles and lines in different shapes and sizes, put together in specific or intricate patterns. Stripping to its last line was a process but watching all the pieces come together when drawing the object from scratch - like a jigsaw puzzle - is where the magical touch lay. The brushes and pencils felt like a wand, art - a giddy spell. The Harry Potter world? I lived there.
The trick was to picture an object as a fusion of its array of components. It made the process of fixing the drawing much more manageable. Does the sketch of the hand look stiff? You don't have to erase the entire thing to repeat the picture; you can quickly figure out it is due to the lines making up the fingers are too straight and parallel.
Seeing how understanding the process not only made the difficult postures and complicated vases a lot less intimidating and undoable, but it also sparked my curiosity to a different extent. The understanding was a tool; it was the shovel for digging up the answers to how and why. Understanding how and why made me feel empowered.
In the ensuing years, my curiosity transcended from paper to actual objects. From toys to remotes, I would dissect each of them - much to mum's dismay - like a surgeon to discover what wonder lies inside those plastic barriers. But the real fascination always struck while putting them back together, like a puzzle piece (albeit sometimes unsuccessfully). It bloomed a sense of awe - just like after creating a painting - to be able to reassemble all the keys, pins, and dampers correctly into my toy piano and watch it work just fine. Understanding the process was just not a tool; it was a communication method; it was progress.
In school, I applied the same principles to learning difficult concepts. Mathematics was alright before, but when the abstruse equations are seen as mere puzzle pieces to find the answer, the picture, the huge question marks in your head shrinks down to exclamation marks of joy. For every right variable put into the equation, you unlock a more significant part of the puzzle - the answer - and another hit of dopamine stimulates your brain. The end goal ends up just not seeking the solution but enjoying the process as well.
My intrinsic curiosity helped solve problems too. With the knowledge of the mechanism of my mechanical pencil (having deconstructed it numerous times already), I quickly found out why the lead was not coming out. The dispenser was stuck to the ring, stopping the dispenser from opening up to let the lead out. I attached the dispenser back to the clutch below it: I still use the pencil to this day. It was nice to save a few bucks on a new pencil, but it was far more incredible to be able to fix it on my own. The fifth-grader me became a problem solver; I became an engineer.
While working for the campaigns and social media posts of my non-profit organisations, my theory helps me create emotion-provoking illustrations and posters to grab the reader's attention. With our community not being particularly welcoming to the LGBTQ community, we had to be discreet about showing support on Pride Month. So when given the task of creating a template subtle enough to be overlooked by the general public but the message prominent to those intended, I kind of hit a dead end. I started to view the components required in the template as puzzle pieces, and find an alternative. The bold "Pride Month" head changed to a warm "Love is Love", and instead of incorporating the pride flag, I included people of different race and genders, wearing clothes and standing in such an order that it resembled the pattern of the pride flag colours. The head of the creative department had been ecstatic with the result, and I had been happy to design a solution to a problem.
After reading The design of everyday things by Don Norman, I promptly aspired to become a design engineer. As one, I planned to make products more efficient and interactive. My interests slightly changed after studying thermodynamics in GCE A Levels. The plan is still designing, but not just products in general but more efficient and sustainable combustion and propulsion systems. I took a more in-depth online course on Intro to thermodynamics where I learned about Carnot Efficiency (the maximum efficiency a heat engine can reach) and realised how much more we have to push to reach the limit. Energy consumption is only predicted to increase tenfold in the upcoming years, and we need sustainable systems and engines to keep up with the demands. More puzzle pieces are left to find to build the steps towards this goal, and the university serves as the supplement of these missing pieces.
Art and engineering have helped me find myself in the creative pool of problem-solving. It has helped me find a genuine sense of purpose, a feasible means of profoundly influencing our world and the quality of life.
