CA Essay A 12.20.15 Draft 2

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. (250-650 words)

I had ample free time as a kid, and the resulting opportunity to pursue whatever I wanted early on in my life shaped the most defining characteristic of my personality: unbridled curiosity and an ability to be absolutely astounded by things everyone else takes for granted. I remember clearly the first day I realized how incredible the flight of birds is. (Seriously, think about it. I want to impress upon you how truly astounding birds are.) Even now I’ll occasionally be close to a crow or robin as it perches and then takes off, and I’m amazed all over again--first a giddy, childlike excitement and then a quiet, indescribable sense of reverie.

Of course, not all my pursuits as a child were so profound: I burst bags of a secret biochemical formula (saline water) on my lawn to strategically kill areas of grass, lit model rocket engines inside confined places to test the limits of what my neighbors would tolerate before calling the police, unceremoniously beat various electronic devices to death in order to dissect them, and spent countless hours developing cutting edge LEGO spaceship technology. I carried this hands-on, anecdote-friendly exploration over into high school, where I spent endless hours designing and building everything from an omnidirectional drive for a FIRST robot to balsa bridges, fan-driven Maglevs and 3-D models of proteins--not to mention accidentally lighting my hair on fire, engraving my initials on all my possessions until I was banned from the engraver, and demonstrating oscillating chemical reactions to the awe of the underclassmen. I’m the guy blasting Christmas jazz while working on Science Olympiad, always ready to direct freshmen to a specific tool or answer a tricky homework question.

What these experiences have shaped in me is a lasting love of discovery (it’s not just a phase, mom, I swear!). Engrossing yourself in the appreciation for a simple object, an idea, or a tiny part of nature instantly brings you to a unique and profound mental state. I’ve been lost in this reverie admiring everything from flowers and cats to kinetic sculptures and Christmas ornaments. I was recently introduced to the concept of Jeong, a Korean word that tries to capture the sense of love, nostalgia, duty, and appreciation in a relationship that develops through time and shared experience--what I need to do now is to find another difficult-to-translate word that expresses my Jeong for the aspects of the beautiful world around me.

My spin on Jeong causes me to explore widely: I’m all over Scrabble and trivia games, and my friends will attest to my ability to identify paintings seemingly out of nowhere and deliver encyclopedic tidbits of Star Wars lore. I read novels daily, and usually have several nonfiction books or textbook chapters going at once. I’m told by my family that I was the easiest kid on their list to buy presents for--I would literally read anything, a theory that was clearly put to the test at various points, judging by some of the crazy books I still have on my bookshelf from my childhood (400 pages on the unusual death of Meriwether Lewis? A Spanish-English dictionary from when I was ten?). As I’ve committed more of my time to classes, clubs, and projects, I’ve become more judicious when it comes to reading, but books are still the crucial catalyst that lets me satisfy my need to explore and engage my environment.

I’ve shared with you the anecdotes and experiences that I think are most characteristic of my personality, and I imagine that I will forge countless more as I take the next step in my education. In the spirit of Richard Feynman, who told us to “study hard whatever interests you most in the most undisciplined, irreverent, and original way possible,” I’m going to spend my life satisfying the most fundamental characteristic I have: curiosity.