Hi! Can you guys read this over and let me know what you think about, anything you like/don't like about it. Thanks for all your comments in advance :)
Stanford students possess an intellectual vitality. Reflect on an idea or experience that has been important to your intellectual development.
As a child, I wanted to be a ballerina, a writer, or an inventor. I always had the vision of designing and creating the next new things that people would love and utilize. In my imagination, I would consider how to make flying cars and portable houses. Because I always just saw the end invention, the process of making it always seemed a bit enigmatic. The desire to be an inventor and the concept of what an inventor was followed me throughout high school. When I took AP Chemistry, AP Alchemy flew out my head as I discovered how every process in the natural world could be explained and measured with numbers and calculations to make very logical sense. In a way, technology also lost some of its mystical appeal to me.
When I was a child, I would find my father's engineering office a boring place with a lot of wire and equipment resembling dialysis machines. But in high school, when I reentered that similar world during a summer internship at SilverPlus Inc., the wires and computer chips had meaning. My intern project was to develop a complex program, which ran on a microcontroller, to make it drive a piezo speaker. I enjoyed programming for its math, but this assignment seemed beyond my level. An engineer taught me the techniques of simplifying a complex piece of code by testing it in smaller chunks, until at last I began to analyze it. I realized that the mystical "engineering genius" I expected of brilliant engineers was their creativity in inventing simple techniques to gracefully solve nested problems. After weeks on this project, I tested my program and made it send voltage currents through the speaker. I saw the voltage waves appear on the oscilloscope and heard the speaker's clear sound with the probe; it was like seeing my creation's pulse and hearing its voice. It mystified me that something I helped invent on a computer could work in real life. I felt that the process of inventing something was probably always more amazing than the end invention itself.
Stanford students possess an intellectual vitality. Reflect on an idea or experience that has been important to your intellectual development.
As a child, I wanted to be a ballerina, a writer, or an inventor. I always had the vision of designing and creating the next new things that people would love and utilize. In my imagination, I would consider how to make flying cars and portable houses. Because I always just saw the end invention, the process of making it always seemed a bit enigmatic. The desire to be an inventor and the concept of what an inventor was followed me throughout high school. When I took AP Chemistry, AP Alchemy flew out my head as I discovered how every process in the natural world could be explained and measured with numbers and calculations to make very logical sense. In a way, technology also lost some of its mystical appeal to me.
When I was a child, I would find my father's engineering office a boring place with a lot of wire and equipment resembling dialysis machines. But in high school, when I reentered that similar world during a summer internship at SilverPlus Inc., the wires and computer chips had meaning. My intern project was to develop a complex program, which ran on a microcontroller, to make it drive a piezo speaker. I enjoyed programming for its math, but this assignment seemed beyond my level. An engineer taught me the techniques of simplifying a complex piece of code by testing it in smaller chunks, until at last I began to analyze it. I realized that the mystical "engineering genius" I expected of brilliant engineers was their creativity in inventing simple techniques to gracefully solve nested problems. After weeks on this project, I tested my program and made it send voltage currents through the speaker. I saw the voltage waves appear on the oscilloscope and heard the speaker's clear sound with the probe; it was like seeing my creation's pulse and hearing its voice. It mystified me that something I helped invent on a computer could work in real life. I felt that the process of inventing something was probably always more amazing than the end invention itself.
Do You Need