Treeee
Nov 17, 2025
Undergraduate / Personal statement for HKUST - Chemical and Biology Engineering program [4]
@Holt
Here is the revised version, hope you can look through it for me. Thank you very much for helping.
The sensor refused to work. Lines of "Device not configured" kept stacking up like piles of scraps, uneven and flawed. We'd been trying to fix it up for the last 2 weeks. Hours slowly turned into days as the arid smell of soldered lead lingered in the room. We were building a rapid-detection module for antibiotic residues, a simple, resilient technology vital for under-resourced aquaculture farmers in Southern Vietnam, but the stubborn optical fiber kept producing unreliable readings. I remember the frustration, hands trembling as I tried to solder the streaks and faint dents on the circuit board, praying it would somehow boot up by itself.
My first instinct, honed by years of striving for perfection, was to fix the messy circuit board.
"Perhaps it was the wiring?", I thought to myself as I rushed to re-engineer the whole thing without a second thought. Pieces of molten lead dripped down onto my piles of neatly stacked papers, slowly eating them away. The more I chased symmetry, the more data spikes and flickers seemed to multiply. Feeling defeated, I turned back to the initial noises.
The breakthrough came beneath the discarded sketches: a friend's doodle of an asymmetrical, borderline chaotic layout to filter out data. Testing it felt reckless, like surrendering to the very imperfection I sought to control. Thoughts of failures raced through me in mere minutes. "What if I failed again? What if it doesn't work?". It was all "what if"s.
My hand hovered over the soldering iron, barely touching my skin as I stared blankly at the sketch. Seeing no other options, I got to work anyway. The tip started to melt away the "perfect" wiring I once admired. Smoke rising from the module. Everything was in suspense.
Then, one, two, three minutes. We erupted in joy as the sensor readings stabilized. My friends were grinning and shouting in excitement. Yet I was the only one standing there, in silence. My world came crashing down. The very imperfection I sought to control was THE solution to our problems. With mixed feelings, I started to realize the excitement of embracing the necessary disorder, rather than blindly following theoretical perfections. It was the "chaotic harmony" of applied engineering, and it re-framed how I view the world, from the complexity of scientific data to the process simulation in Chemical and Biological Engineering.
I then internalized this sense of finding in my school's science community, PRISEE. During our first planning session for the water-themed workshop, I was overwhelmed by the juniors' endless streams of suggestions and ideas. They came down on me like a waterfall, noisy and unfiltered. A part of me tried to fight back, shutting them out like a caged animal with nowhere to run.
A thought then came running back: What if I tried it again, just once more?
Taking a piece of paper out, I called everyone up and formed a close-knit circle. Lines by lines, we each wrote down our inputs - rough, raw, and un-polished, but "alive" nevertheless. I helped them trace back the flaws in their suggestions, interrogating strategies, hearing and voicing my insights towards their ideas, the bolder, the better. Under the lukewarm light, we would spend the whole session debating frameworks, simulating what we thought was possible in those circumstances. Little did I know, I have fostered a safe haven where peers can iterate, fail, and speak out their opinions. Despite our core frameworks being rejected for its bulkiness, they pulled me in with the calling of "chaotic harmony" as I learned to innovate through the flaws and imperfections.
Now as I reflect upon the journey, the bitter aftertaste of lead would sting me a little, the constant nagging from my juniors would still annoy me whenever we go out for a drink. Yet in my eyes, flickered data is a source of inspirations, not just disturbance. I aim to turn the seemingly pointless noise signals into something tangible, an opportunity to refine the sensor to be better-equipped for resilient environmental conditions, helping many developing regions around the world. This is my way of interpreting imperfections, and this is how I would continue to grow at HKUST.
@Holt
Here is the revised version, hope you can look through it for me. Thank you very much for helping.
The sensor refused to work. Lines of "Device not configured" kept stacking up like piles of scraps, uneven and flawed. We'd been trying to fix it up for the last 2 weeks. Hours slowly turned into days as the arid smell of soldered lead lingered in the room. We were building a rapid-detection module for antibiotic residues, a simple, resilient technology vital for under-resourced aquaculture farmers in Southern Vietnam, but the stubborn optical fiber kept producing unreliable readings. I remember the frustration, hands trembling as I tried to solder the streaks and faint dents on the circuit board, praying it would somehow boot up by itself.
My first instinct, honed by years of striving for perfection, was to fix the messy circuit board.
"Perhaps it was the wiring?", I thought to myself as I rushed to re-engineer the whole thing without a second thought. Pieces of molten lead dripped down onto my piles of neatly stacked papers, slowly eating them away. The more I chased symmetry, the more data spikes and flickers seemed to multiply. Feeling defeated, I turned back to the initial noises.
The breakthrough came beneath the discarded sketches: a friend's doodle of an asymmetrical, borderline chaotic layout to filter out data. Testing it felt reckless, like surrendering to the very imperfection I sought to control. Thoughts of failures raced through me in mere minutes. "What if I failed again? What if it doesn't work?". It was all "what if"s.
My hand hovered over the soldering iron, barely touching my skin as I stared blankly at the sketch. Seeing no other options, I got to work anyway. The tip started to melt away the "perfect" wiring I once admired. Smoke rising from the module. Everything was in suspense.
Then, one, two, three minutes. We erupted in joy as the sensor readings stabilized. My friends were grinning and shouting in excitement. Yet I was the only one standing there, in silence. My world came crashing down. The very imperfection I sought to control was THE solution to our problems. With mixed feelings, I started to realize the excitement of embracing the necessary disorder, rather than blindly following theoretical perfections. It was the "chaotic harmony" of applied engineering, and it re-framed how I view the world, from the complexity of scientific data to the process simulation in Chemical and Biological Engineering.
I then internalized this sense of finding in my school's science community, PRISEE. During our first planning session for the water-themed workshop, I was overwhelmed by the juniors' endless streams of suggestions and ideas. They came down on me like a waterfall, noisy and unfiltered. A part of me tried to fight back, shutting them out like a caged animal with nowhere to run.
A thought then came running back: What if I tried it again, just once more?
Taking a piece of paper out, I called everyone up and formed a close-knit circle. Lines by lines, we each wrote down our inputs - rough, raw, and un-polished, but "alive" nevertheless. I helped them trace back the flaws in their suggestions, interrogating strategies, hearing and voicing my insights towards their ideas, the bolder, the better. Under the lukewarm light, we would spend the whole session debating frameworks, simulating what we thought was possible in those circumstances. Little did I know, I have fostered a safe haven where peers can iterate, fail, and speak out their opinions. Despite our core frameworks being rejected for its bulkiness, they pulled me in with the calling of "chaotic harmony" as I learned to innovate through the flaws and imperfections.
Now as I reflect upon the journey, the bitter aftertaste of lead would sting me a little, the constant nagging from my juniors would still annoy me whenever we go out for a drink. Yet in my eyes, flickered data is a source of inspirations, not just disturbance. I aim to turn the seemingly pointless noise signals into something tangible, an opportunity to refine the sensor to be better-equipped for resilient environmental conditions, helping many developing regions around the world. This is my way of interpreting imperfections, and this is how I would continue to grow at HKUST.
