Here are my drafts for my M.I.T. application. They're pretty rough, so I am mostly looking for advice on overall content (e.g. structure, do I get the message across, should I change topics, etc.). The last essay is too long, so advice on cutting it down would also be helpful.
Thanks in advance!
"We know you lead a busy life, full of activities, many of which are required of you. Tell us about something you do for the pleasure of it. (*)(100 words or fewer)"
You would be surprised how much it physically hurts to crash a model plane. The abrupt sounds and crushing disappointment are unavoidably haunting and at times insomnia-inducing. So where is the fun, you may ask? It lies on the other side: rebuilding. Shamefully taking home mangled shreds of foam and electronics is more than worth the constructive euphoria that follows. Scavenging around the house for spare pieces of duct tape and toothpicks and turning an object that was irrevocably destroyed back into a beautiful flying machine is unusually gratifying, even if the plane has been weightily smothered with 9 ounces of epoxy.
"Although you may not yet know what you want to major in, which department or program at MIT appeals to you and why? (*) (100 words or fewer)"
When my great uncle gifted me his worn set of The Feynman Lectures on Physics I spent 9 days staring into Volumes 1 and 2 so intently I had to borrow my dad's Visine eye drops. The lectures showed me how (for lack of a better phrase) mind-blowing the natural world is. When I visited M.I.T. physics department last Spring everyone there had the same astonishment and hungering curiosity about how the world works. To study physics with people who share my sense of wonder and insatiable interest would be incredible, to say the least.
"Tell us about a time you used your creativity. This could be something you made, a project that you led, an idea that you came up with, or pretty much anything else. (*) (200-250 words)"
"What the heck is an L-O-L?" There really isn't a good way to answer this question. But I was repetitively asked this and similar acronym questions by grandparents, parents, friends' parents, and parents' friends. Unfortunately, acronyms are inherently flawed. Unlike regular words which consist of varying lengths and sounds, acronyms always tend to come rushed off the tongue in the same this-that-this manner. This makes them very easy to forget, which in turn caused me to become an interpreter for my family. But I thought there was a better solution. My first idea was to rid the world of acronyms altogether by starting an ad campaign titled This Is Why We Enunciate, but I soon realized that I lacked both the funding and the connections to start a worldwide movement against letters. My next idea was to create a smartphone application that translated common acronyms into full-fledged words. This idea required no money or powerful connections (other than WiFi, of course) so I gave it a shot. A year later it had over 2500 downloads and I was ecstatic. Unfortunately, acronyms have since been replaced by intelligent auto-correct programs and my application has suffered a loss of user base. Fortunately, though, people are using proper English when they text message each other, and to me that is worth much more than a tiny application.
"Describe the world you come from; for example, your family, clubs, school, community, city, or town. How has that world shaped your dreams and aspirations?(*) (200-250 words)"
There isn't anything noteworthy about where I come from. I grew up in a typical middle class suburb, surrounded by regular suburb-type people who partook in regular suburban activities. But there lies a tad more unusuality in how I came from where I did.
My house was always That House, the one that broke the homeowners association's house color-code because my mom wanted a sky-blue house and a sun-yellow front door.
My dad a pilot and my mom an artist, my experiences growing up were pretty eclectic. When my father was out on trips, my mom and I would rearrange the entire house or paint the walls a loud orange just to see if my dad would notice. Once, we painted the complete score of The Beatles' All You Need is Love on the foyer walls, but even that project pales in comparison to our clandestine cat adoption(s). When my dad was home, which was usually at odd hours in the night, he terminated my bedtime and I stayed up for hours with him sitting in front of a chalkboard, drinking pulp-free orange juice, and discreetly discussing aerodynamics.
Being a resident of That House and having an offbeat upbringing gave me a sense of freedom. Not in the American sense of freedom-from, but a sense of freedom-to; a freedom to be worry-free and creative and learn anything and everything I wanted.
"Tell us about the most significant challenge you've faced or something important that didn't go according to plan. How did you manage the situation?(*) (200-250 words)"
12 hours left. And it didn't work. The machine we had so meticulously CAD-ed and built and programmed 8 hours a day for 6 weeks didn't work.
The robot itself was operational. Every motor turned and the programming was bug-free. The failure lied the the geometrical complexities of our robot's most sacred component: the arm.
Of course, using the phrase "geometrical complexities" makes the issue sound unavoidable and unforeseeable. But anyone with a 9th grade geometry class under their belt could have calculated the error. The arm, which was designed to bring our 120lb. robot 90 inches off the ground in 30 seconds, didn't fit the ladder-rungs it was supposed to grapple.
The realization hit my team and I like a train hits a very disappointed person. I determined we had two options: give up or gamble with an attempt to rebuild. Since our workshop is ladened with stickers reading "FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION" in block letters, we felt obligated to gamble. So we synchronized our watches and set to work, decidedly scrapping the whole arm idea and jazzishly improvising a new bot. Adapting the mechanical components to our new (lack of) design was simple, but before we knew it the watches rang 2230. The only task left was re-calibrating the vision-targeting system (my job as lead programmer) but the math involved was too time-consuming for me to complete in time. So I tried the long-proven strategy of time-crunched programmers: delegation. Soon there were 10 people shouting trigonometric integrals and furiously pounding their T.I. calculators and tape-measuring triangles all over the floor. It was a moment of beauty, if you were a math-person. With 22 minutes to spare the programming was finished, our bot was finished, and we were finished, physically.
