COMMON APP ESSAY
1 minute to win.
The odds were stacked against me: I had ZOGPIR in my deck. Despite my better judgment, my fingers attempted miscellaneous combinations; GamePigeon communicated its disappointment through shrieking vibration at its rejection of "zog", "piz", "gop". Accepted: "rip", "zip." Rejected: "zop." Accepted: "grip", "pig." Rejected: "priz." Time ran out.
Anagram was my entryway into linguistics: examining the infinite combinations of our 26-letter alphabet, and how limiting six characters could be. Since then, I have explored WORDLE, ABSURDLE, the NYT's Spelling Bee, and Semantle.
Semantle is structured like a thought process. Every word in the world is fixed onto a web- one curated by articles, books, podcasts, and tweets- where words are related through different associations. For example, if "Bee" was my current best guess, the options for my next choice could be anything: from "Honey" to "Spider" to "Anaphylaxis."
That's when guessing becomes subjective; entirely based on the connections of my mind map- curated by my experiences.
sunrise + ambulance = heart attack
I stared at the ambulance as it sped down the street. The frigid morning air terrorized my body, but my hands and feet were paralyzed. My eyes clenched shut.
24 nerve-racking hours later, I found out my father had an LDLR gene mutation, causing low-density lipoproteins to stay in his bloodstream and clog his arteries, resulting in the 95% occlusion heart attack he'd had.
DNA sequencing, which was used to determine this, had not been a possibility for my grandparents, disadvantaged, first-generation immigrants, who had been unable to learn of their predisposition to hypercholesterolemia before they suddenly passed away.
Aware of preventative measures my father and I can take, I am no longer paralyzed by fear. I can change what would once have been a deadly diagnosis. My not-so-unique experience exemplified the blatant reality that within the millions saved by discoveries, therapies, and treatments, there are dads, brothers, moms, and daughters.
My realization motivated my desire to contribute to the body of knowledge that yields life-saving advancements and search for opportunities to conduct research.
motivation + curiosity = research
Last summer, in the O'Hern Lab at Yale University, I got a chance.
On my first day, I was told to "read studies." Unsure what exactly that meant, I started going down the lab's published links, one by one. I was greeted by "Ramachandran Plots", "NMR", and "Hydrophobicity Scales". Defeated, I spent the rest of the day coping, AKA playing Candy Crush. The next day, though, I tried again: I found the first "Introduction to Biophysics" textbook available in .pdf form and started annotating (and aggressively Googling).
Eventually, I found my focus: Why did a protein in the cytosol of an E. coli cell behave differently when put into a human cell? I was thrust into the world of quinary structure; the fifth "layer" of protein structure, and a new biophysics field.
Literature suggested that the change in protein dynamic in a new cytosol stemmed from structural differences between human and E. coli proteins, but after developing a more accurate method of testing this hypothesis, I found that the proteins weren't nearly divergent enough to explain their in-cell behaviors.
Sharing these results and discussing potential alternate explanations with the Ph.D. students and postdocs in the lab was gratifying. I started emulating them: whether by learning to display my data on command with a trend graph, or more subtly by using the accepted, but unofficial, lab font. I built new associations: polymer simulations + cooling → quenching and negative surface charge + high density → more repulsion.
Semantle forces me to mine for new interpretations, reexamine my clues, and look from different angles, sometimes literally. Inner structures provide new ways to understand cell behaviors, and everything about us.