Prompt: How has your background influenced the types of problems you want to solve? Limit 500 words.
As I was growing up, both of my parents worked in New York City, working long hours from dawn till dusk; thus, my grandparents took care of me for the first few years of my life. My grandparents were immigrants from Korea, and ran a failing laundromat where I spent a majority of the time, crawling on the ground and learning English from the Teletubbies on a small TV.
When I started going to school, I quickly began to notice differences between my classmate's possessions and my own. They would speak of things of which I had never heard. A cell phone? What is an internet? The first time I heard of a Playstation, I thought it was literally a station in which a child would play, maybe with a plastic hammer or a fake hamburger to cook on a fake stove. By going on playdates at my friends' houses, I was introduced to new technology that was absent from my life until recently. Computers! Televisions larger than five inches! I quickly became enamoured with technology and began to wonder why everybody did not have them.
However, when my family moved to Illinois, my mother decided to become a stay-at-home mother, taking care of me and my siblings, transporting us to and from school and such. Since she no longer worked long hours every day, she decided to indulge a bit and buy a few things for her own use. For the first time, we owned a large-ish television and a computer, both of which made our lives more comfortable and easier to organize. However, some people would call the area we moved to 'the ghetto'; many families could barely afford to pay mortgage much less buy fancy new electronics even though many assignments required an electronic format. As I went through school, I learned about people even less fortunate in third world countries, who did not even have running water nor roads. I began to wonder even more why there were so many people who did not have access to such wonderful things.
As I grew up, I began to realize that I was actually decent at math and science, and I began to think: "Maybe I could help solve this problem. Maybe I could help make technology easily accessible to anyone". Since then, I have looked into several fields of technology, settling on engineering or computer science, both of which I believe can be used to improve lives around the world. Coming from a background in which my sixty year old grandfather could split an apple with his bare hands because he never had sharp enough knives, to living in a setting in which I have access to some of the newest technologies, I know first hand how vital technology is in making life more enjoyable and easier, and I want to let everyone experience the same. I believe that Harvey Mudd can help me reach my goal to provide cheap, yet advanced technology to everyone.
(498 words)
This is due in a few days. Thank you for your input!
You present a good essay that depicts the problem you want to solve but the essay lacks a sense of personal connection. This kind of essay will be highly effective if you are able to present a more personal connection to the problem you wish to solve. Right now, the situation you present seems to come out more of envy rather than a real problem that you wish to present a solution to. Try to find a deeper reason or problem to solve aside from tech gadget lifestyle discrepancies. Something like a disparity in health care or housing problems should suffice. That is, unless you are majoring in a technology course in which case, you will just need to present a deeper connection between you and the problem you present.
