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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
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