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+The Personal Essay (250--650 words)
+Options:
+- Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is
+  so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete
+  without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.
+- The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to
+  later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or
+  failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the
+  experience?
+- Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea.
+  What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome?
+- Describe a problem you've solved or a problem you'd like to solve. It
+  can be an intellectual challenge, a research query, an ethical
+  dilemma---anything that is of personal importance, no matter the
+  scale. Explain its significance to you and what steps you took or
+  could be taken to identify a solution.
+- Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period
+  of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.
+- Describe a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging that it makes
+  you lose all track of time. Why does it captivate you? What or who do
+  you turn to when you want to learn more?
+- Share an essay on any topic of your choice. It can be one you've
+  already written, one that responds to a different prompt, or one of
+  your own design.
+
+Describe a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging that it makes
+you lose all track of time. Why does it captivate you? What or who do
+you turn to when you want to learn more?
+
+"Grok: to understand intimately and completely."
+I live in pursuit of fundamental understanding in general and am more
+than willing to bang my head against a wall to achieve it.
+This is somewhat a pedagogical trick---learning conflates understanding. 
+But deep understanding does have value.
+
+Mathematical reasoning, the formalistic kind, requires it to determine
+novel results, and I can easily get lost in mathematical problems with
+well-defined start points.
+Take Hilbert systems, "axiomatizations" (definitions) of formal logic,
+with exactly one operator---"if A then B."
+These axioms define certain transformations you can do on true
+statements and still keep them true, like "if it's raining, then if I'm
+wearing boots, it's raining."
+From there, you can construct much bigger and more useful theory, either
+by adding new axioms like equality or variables, or by inference from
+the existing axioms.
+I see this construction from first principles as beautiful, but it's not
+entirely aesthetic.
+Higher mathematics has a reputation for being unpragmatic---and it
+is---but its absolute correctness means that given simple assumptions,
+complex results can be shown to be intuitively, exactly true.
+And the process of finding a solution is equally rewarding "not because
+it is easy but because it is hard."
+>> Probably silly to include
+
+Programming computers is less fundamental, but it's similarly
+enthralling.
+There are dozens of layers of abstraction that form a complete system.
+I wish I could completely understand the full stack, and I might be able
+to---superficially and for a single specific machine or purpose, but
+like the whole of mathematics, it is impossible for anyone to fully
+understand it all.
+Currently, I'm writing a program that serves resources over a network
+protocol.
+It isn't currently working, but that's part of the fun: the
+breakthroughs and blockage are great.
+Deciphering a complex system into an exact description is just
+indescribably captivating, like code-breaking or inventing.
+This is, to be fair, reinventing the wheel, but that is often one of the
+best ways to understand it.
+I've worked on other levels of abstraction, from assembly language to
+cloud environments, and it's always very interesting for me to 
+Pragmatists would criticize me for reinventing the wheel, and although I
+am, 
+
+Both math and programming I've touched on academically, math moreso, but
+I haven't reached out to the community locally.
+I