Undergraduate / "My curiosity and ideas" - Columbia University NY. What attracts you to engineering? [7]

Hello, please could someone read and offer corrections to this essay...thanks alot
It is way over the character count so if you could offer suggestions for unnecessary parts, I would be really grateful.

2. Please tell us what attracts you specifically to the study of engineering.

My dad is taking me back home from a Science Club meeting when all of a sudden traffic comes to a standstill. I am deeply immersed in a copy of Popular Science - College Issue and so I do not look up. Then comes the groaning and curses of other drivers. I stop reading for a while to try and clear my head of the distractions and then delve back into the world of black and white. Then my concentration is broken when my dad asks what type of a country we are living in - a very important question that plagues the minds of numerous citizens of my country. I am forced to leave the world were kids blow things up to look for the source of this discontent. I look around and I do not see anything unusual. I t cannot be traffic lights because there are none. It cannot be an automobile accident or else we would still be moving. I finally spot the source. It is a sight I have seen nearly every week of my sixteen years well spent in this country - a cart. It is a cart with almost a ton of wood in it with a man behind it, pushing it. He is bare-chested with only a pair of shorts on and a wet towel on his head held in place with a cap. His muscles are rippling and sweat drips from his body, forming little puddles as he makes strenuous effort to push the cart which is made of wood and of formidable weight itself. Finally, he pushes the cart across the road and will probably push it for about four more miles. Traffic starts to move and we are soon on our way. But I have become disinterested in the science magazine on my laps and instead, not for the first time, reflected on what I just saw.

In a developed country, what I had just seen would have turned heads. It would stick out like a sore thumb. I wondered why no one was visibly making an effort to make the jobs of such people easier. A simple application of the rules of load and effort could aid the man in doing his work faster and less strenuously. But in the country where I come from, a lot of people are not fully educated and are struggling to make end meet not to talk of making the jobs of people such as the cart pusher easier.

I have always had a lot of ideas. Ideas to improve the world I live in - a world of suffering and difficult challenges, ideas to change the quality of people's lives for the better, to improve on and create new things. Engineering is all about turning ideas into reality to effectively make the lives of people better. It is about finding ways to help people by making ideas tangible. I believe that the ideas I have can only be made into reality by using the knowledge gained from studying engineering.

There is an old adage in my native language; "The monkey that wants to know everything is the one that gets shot first." I do not believe so. My wise saying is that, "Curiosity brings knowledge and understanding". Curiosity opens doors for new methods of doing things to be discovered and improvement on old processes. Since I was a little child, I had always been curious about how things work, dismantling almost anything within my reach to study the internal components and improve on them. I did this to satisfy my curiosity. Then I realized I have a talent which could be put to better use. Engineering can transform my curiosity into a tool for improving the quality of living in my world.

My curiosity and the ideas I have if combined with the knowledge gained from studying engineering would make the lives of people such as the cart pusher much better. This, I strongly believe makes engineering the right course of study for me. Like Joseph Engelberger (inventor of the industrial robot and a Columbia alumnus) made industrial production easier with his invention, so I hope to use my ideas to effectively change people's lives for the better, and contribute to the furtherance of science. The thought of turning my ideas into reality and harnessing my curiosity, all to make lives such as that of the cart pusher a whole lot better attracts me to engineering like a bee is attracted to colorful flowers.