Hey guys! Below is my essay for the Porter scholarship at Skidmore. I'd appreciate any feedback:
Prompt: What aroused your interests in science and/or math, and what have you done to pursue them? No word limit.
"They said this money serves God's purpose, but now they act like it belongs to them", said my grandfather with contempt, after resigning from his various posts with the Swadhyay Parivar. This intrigued me, and on further research I learnt that over the years that organization had been involved in many fraudulent business practices, and with a membership of over five million, had come to very closely resemble a cult. Thus began my fascination with social psychology - understanding what drives people's behaviors and why we behave the way we do.
In this regard, the internet proved to be a great mentor - from the brilliant psychology blog 'The Situationist', I learnt how the widely accepted beliefs on human thinking and behavior are questionable; from 'Psyblog', I learnt about cognitive biases and how they lead us to making irrational decisions, where as 'The Last Psychiatrist' provided incisive insight into the mind of a practicing psychiatrist. Soon I became the fourteen year old trying to convince his friends why hate could not be a sustainable source of energy for the 'Sith' (from the Star Wars universe) because it is not a natural emotion, but dependent on stimuli from external abhorrent sources. Multiple re-runs of 'Lie to Me' even convinced me that I had become a walking lie-detector with an uncanny ability to decode the slightest tics!
Over time this early interest has grown more academic, and now shares my time with my other passions - mathematics and computer science. I discovered 'ProjectEuler' in tenth standard, and since then my mania for efficiency has only grown. I vividly remember one particularly challenging problem - finding the last ten digits of the non-Mersenne prime 28433×2^(7830457)+1. It consumed me completely for two whole days, but I was finally able to bring down the run-time of my code from three minutes to less than a second. That sense of adventure in exploring the many intricacies of a tough algorithm, that freedom for creative openness, provided a most exhilarating high; I have been hooked ever since.
Since my education system does not provide much latitude with respect to these interests, I have endeavored to continue my journey of self-improvement by taking online courses such as 'Introduction to Programming in Java' and 'Introduction to MATLAB' (MIT OpenCourseWare). My attempts to link together mathematics and computer science have produced many interesting results - the search for an efficient prime number generator introduced me to the Sieves of Atkins and Eratosthenes; the quest for finding the largest Collatz chain under one million led me to research papers attempting to solve the Collatz Problem. I also try to keep up with the latest research in psychology through online forums. Just last week I came across the ground-breaking longitudinal study by Prof. David Lubinski's group at Vanderbilt University, which concluded that although gifted children are most likely to be the next generation's innovators, education methods in most US schools do not allow them to reach their full potential. A long-term effort like this has every potential to impact government policy, within and without the United States.
My ambition is to work at the critical juncture of psychology and computation - to understand group dynamics and their significance in policy formation, to discover the hidden influence cultural factors on consumer habits, to decipher how the crowd forms decisions and what compels an individual to blindly follow the herd. If I can use my research to understand what makes people believe so firmly in an ideology that they do not think twice before taking their own lives, and if I can make even one person see reason, I honestly believe my purpose in life would have been served.
Prompt: What aroused your interests in science and/or math, and what have you done to pursue them? No word limit.
"They said this money serves God's purpose, but now they act like it belongs to them", said my grandfather with contempt, after resigning from his various posts with the Swadhyay Parivar. This intrigued me, and on further research I learnt that over the years that organization had been involved in many fraudulent business practices, and with a membership of over five million, had come to very closely resemble a cult. Thus began my fascination with social psychology - understanding what drives people's behaviors and why we behave the way we do.
In this regard, the internet proved to be a great mentor - from the brilliant psychology blog 'The Situationist', I learnt how the widely accepted beliefs on human thinking and behavior are questionable; from 'Psyblog', I learnt about cognitive biases and how they lead us to making irrational decisions, where as 'The Last Psychiatrist' provided incisive insight into the mind of a practicing psychiatrist. Soon I became the fourteen year old trying to convince his friends why hate could not be a sustainable source of energy for the 'Sith' (from the Star Wars universe) because it is not a natural emotion, but dependent on stimuli from external abhorrent sources. Multiple re-runs of 'Lie to Me' even convinced me that I had become a walking lie-detector with an uncanny ability to decode the slightest tics!
Over time this early interest has grown more academic, and now shares my time with my other passions - mathematics and computer science. I discovered 'ProjectEuler' in tenth standard, and since then my mania for efficiency has only grown. I vividly remember one particularly challenging problem - finding the last ten digits of the non-Mersenne prime 28433×2^(7830457)+1. It consumed me completely for two whole days, but I was finally able to bring down the run-time of my code from three minutes to less than a second. That sense of adventure in exploring the many intricacies of a tough algorithm, that freedom for creative openness, provided a most exhilarating high; I have been hooked ever since.
Since my education system does not provide much latitude with respect to these interests, I have endeavored to continue my journey of self-improvement by taking online courses such as 'Introduction to Programming in Java' and 'Introduction to MATLAB' (MIT OpenCourseWare). My attempts to link together mathematics and computer science have produced many interesting results - the search for an efficient prime number generator introduced me to the Sieves of Atkins and Eratosthenes; the quest for finding the largest Collatz chain under one million led me to research papers attempting to solve the Collatz Problem. I also try to keep up with the latest research in psychology through online forums. Just last week I came across the ground-breaking longitudinal study by Prof. David Lubinski's group at Vanderbilt University, which concluded that although gifted children are most likely to be the next generation's innovators, education methods in most US schools do not allow them to reach their full potential. A long-term effort like this has every potential to impact government policy, within and without the United States.
My ambition is to work at the critical juncture of psychology and computation - to understand group dynamics and their significance in policy formation, to discover the hidden influence cultural factors on consumer habits, to decipher how the crowd forms decisions and what compels an individual to blindly follow the herd. If I can use my research to understand what makes people believe so firmly in an ideology that they do not think twice before taking their own lives, and if I can make even one person see reason, I honestly believe my purpose in life would have been served.
