Undergraduate /
"What they don't know won't hurt them"; Stanford Supp/ Intellectual Vitality [20]
I am not the best writer, so I am really dependent on EssayForum to help me with my essays, and thank you guys for that! These are my stanford supplements, so please revise in anyway possible!! thank you!
INTELLECTUAL VITALITY: ONE IDEA/EXPERIENCE THAT IMPACTED YOUR INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT.
"What they don't know won't hurt them," said Mr. DeWitt, founder and CEO of Resurgens Bank, when we discussed banking operations at his newly opened bank branch. The words rang in my ear, and memories of joyful research on banking and investments coruscated in the back of my mind. I looked him in the eyes and smiled; I knew exactly what he implied: the beauty of fractional reserve banking.
What if I told you that the paycheck you received last month was just a paper, with no money behind it?
Have you ever heard the story of the goldsmith? As you know, in early Europe, gold was used as currency, but the people needed security over their gold, so a nearby goldsmith opened a vault for that purpose. He began loaning out the deposited gold as exchangeable notes while charging the borrowers interest. Villagers, seeing that the notes were much more convenient, traded using the notes rather than exchanging it for gold at the vault. Overtime, the goldsmith realized that the people rarely withdraw their gold from the vault, so he began loaning out notes with no gold backing them. The goldsmith aggrandized great wealth from the interest returns on these fraudulent notes. The populace, unaware of this, treated the notes with value, and the new monetary system stimulated European growth.
It is one of the most ingenious ideas in history, both Mr. DeWitt and I agreed. Yet I saw a flaw in the system: in my theory, as the sum of these virtual notes surpasses the actual value of all global money, it alters to unpayable debt, to which your paycheck may be part of. But I propose that as long as global supply increases, the system will continue to instigate growth.
Intrigued by its beauty and seeking to not only improve but perfect it, I intend to start a banking empire on which the sun never sets. This objective serves not to fulfill greed; rather, it intends to galvanize economic accretion and express concern for the ever growing issues facing society.
WRITE A LETTER TO YOUR STANFORD ROOMMATE SO WE COULD KNOW MORE ABOUT YOU.
Dear Bro,
In-and-Out Burger, hands down, is the best burger place in the world. If you like it as well, I am sure we will get along just fine! We can go there on weekends to enjoy the food while discussing the rivalry between Newtonian mechanics, Einstein's relativity, and quantum mechanics. Then we can head over to the mall with a microphone and loudly compliment everyone with pickups lines! My favorite line is: "if you were an item on the McDonald menu, you would be McGorgeous." Speaking of McDonalds, I always save up my changes in my pink piggy bank, and I would donate it to the Ronald McDonald House Charity when it fills up. If you have any spare changes, feel free to stick it in the pig. During Christmas, my friends and I would draw eyes on snow-covered cars' front windows so that they would look like characters from the movie Cars, then we would go to the mall and hand out candy canes to strangers to wish them a merry Christmas. I hope you can practice this tradition with me!
At the dorm, I will probably crowd the floor with various projects since I always like to build things. At home, I have built a four-foot long space shuttle out of construction paper and foam. I then attached a motor taken out of a RC toy car to the shuttle so that it could move. We could rebuild that, or we can build a "giant" Great Pyramid out of cards. Besides projects, you may see crumbled papers all over the floor from all the mathematics I do. In my free time, I try to come up with more efficient equations or prove certain conjectures. My greatest success is deriving a new equation for the area of any triangle by expanding the Pythagorean Theorem geometrically, replacing Heron's formula. Currently, I am attempting to prove Format's Theorem, with no end in sight. Yet, the shear difficulty brings joy to my intellectual curiosity. Despite the mess in the room, don't worry because I always clean after myself. Regardless, I hope we will have a great adventure at Stanford as roommates!
WHAT MATTERS THE MOST TO YOU?
"I am sorry; I just don't see you that way. I think we will be better off as friends," said my crush of three years when I asked her out. News of the rejection quickly spread among my friends, one of which jokingly commented, "ha-ha! All that working out and you got rejected!" The words seared my heart, and I looked at my biceps. Did I really spend half of my life at the gym just for a girl? The answer is no; it is something much bigger. Weight lifting has been a part of my life for as long as I could remember.
A day six years ago, I was jogging miles around the neighborhood with the sun scorching my skin and sweat dripping down my head, followed with an hour of pushups until my arms gave up and I was laying on a pool of sweat.
A day five years ago, I walked into a forest with two towels and a water jug, and I hung the towels off a thick tree branch to do pull-ups until my grip slipped from the towel. At home, I tied four water-filled-gallon-jugs to a broomstick and used it as a barbell to do endless sets of squats and bicep curls.
A day three years ago, my mom got me a gym membership at Gold's Gym; it was my first time stepping into a gym, first time touching the rusted dumbbell handles, first time feeling the grip of weight plates. Very soon, the gym became my second home.
A day two years ago, I was at Queen's Recreational Center in New York introducing nutrition plans and work out routines to people seeking to start a lifestyle around exercising and training people from 5:00 PM until 10:00 PM.
And today, I will be at Gold's Gym trying to break my personal record for benching, deadlift, and squatting.
It is hard to remember a day when I was not lifting weights; without a doubt, working out is what matters the most to me. I see it as my source of confidence; it gave me courage to ask out my crush. I see it as my source of inspiration; if I can work hard at the gym, I can work hard at anything else and succeed.