46 Essays that Worked at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Last May, [Place Redacted] sank into brutal violence for 20 days. My last days of holy Ramadan became defiled with dark traumatizing obsessions of losing everything I loved. During that time, whenever I thought of younger children who were losing their homes and families due to the bombing, all I could picture was my younger self the previous war on [Place Redacted], trying to cope with chaos I didn’t even understand. Ultimately, I knew I had to transform my feelings into public service. I decided to dedicate my summer to helping our (true) victims.

In June, as the wind blew up and swiped the war dust away, I joined the Disaster Group at the [Organization Redacted] Institute, a well-respected NGO dedicated to engaging youth in community development through education. There, I worked with children with PTSD, whose houses were demolished during the armed operation, on relieving their stress through storytelling and fun activities. Throughout the summer, I told “The Golden Hen” and sang “Tick Tick Tick Ya Ladybug” more times than I can count, listened to my kids’ stories passionately and took notes secretly on what topics to avoid, and danced “Baby Shark'' like a machine.

Sure, I perhaps sacrificed every single minute of free time that summer, but watching the children relax and share their feelings was certainly worth that much. Even though [Place Redacted] is a place where empathy and compassion are crushed by wars and deprived circumstances, I believe we can empower our children through love, support, and care.

Pulleys. Levers. Clanking metal. Tech music. My favorite place: the gym. I use the same FRC principles of mechanical advantage and weight distribution to design personalized weight training moves that enhance muscle hypertrophy and burden isolation. Factoring in subtle concepts such as motor-unit thresholds and fiber attachments allows me to craft original exercises.

I once even challenged myself creatively by limiting functional resistance to bodyweight when addressing an imbalance in power output: incorporating a slight rotation of the torso and a rep scheme to stimulate the necessary slow-twitch fibers. In cases such as this, (pull-up bar == workbench) && (body == robot)

During my first time tutoring for Physics-in-Motion, I had a student who couldn’t grasp acceleration. The problem: drawing graphs. Why couldn’t she just get it?? Irritated, I tried to explain in every way I knew. But by the end, my face was hot with frustration. How could she not understand? But that was the problem. I was focused on the content, not the person. The freshmen have no place to retreat from the difficulties of acceleration, harmonic oscillators, or Newton's laws. As a tutor, I am supposed to create an environment of comfort, but as her hurried steps faded, I was stuck with the realization that I failed. First and foremost, a tutor is someone that brings calm. They are someone that protects you from the world until you are confident. My freshman didn’t need functions and derivatives, she needed comfort. Much of what I have learned since has been not how to teach, but how to listen and empathize better not only with my students, but also with everyday people. I hope to continue to grow through my activities like tutoring and mentoring. Everyone needs a safe space to learn and through my teaching I want to allow people to grow and learn in a positive environment without risk of ridicule or frustration.

Last summer, I volunteered in a vascular bioengineering lab at the [School Redacted] Boulder. Making and testing vascular grafts, I became interested in biological engineering. In MIT’s Course 20, courses such as Cell Biology and Biological Engineering Design, would lead me back to hands-on research. Having had experience microspinning grafts, I am particularly interested in Professor Laurie Boyer’s work developing 3D cardiac organoids. At Boyer Lab and other similar biological labs that are working to understand the systems of the body, I hope to contribute to knowledge that can make a difference to patients.

I come from a world of customers’ orders jotted down on the backs of old worksheets and midnight chases for trolleys filled with empty boxes at Walmart.

From repurposing old worksheets to using the leftover yarn from my homemade crochet cardigan as strings to control passion fruit vines, my family taught me how thinking resourcefully can help the Earth. In my parents’ innovative hands, even seemingly useless empty chip boxes can turn into containers to pack customers’ orders in. While my parents forced me to wait until every last drop of Great Value mayonnaise reached our homemade tartar sauce due to economic hardships, these frugal habits fueled my innate desire for resourcefulness and sustainability. I want to creatively take advantage of ESI’s resources to develop software that’ll reduce climate change by providing more sustainable energy sources to communities or analyze the poverty that made my parents work tirelessly to support us.

Seeing how starting a composting system during quarantine inspired my parents to start their own vegetable garden of luffas and passion fruits, I realized the influence I can make on small scales. Using my finished compost as free soil, together we have diverted over thirty trash bags of junk mail and pear cores from landfills. With UA Sustain projects like UA Garden and Trash2Treasure, I would love to help increase sustainability at local levels.

At MIT, I aspire to fulfill humanity’s orders on the dark interface of IntelliJ and take advantage of trolleys filled with metaphorical boxes of potential.

I’d always been grateful for being raised in what I thought was a loving and safe community, separate from the hate I’ve seen reported in the news. But one fateful morning, I woke up to the news that overnight a group of students, some of whom sat next to me in class, had gone around my neighborhood destroying Black Lives Matters signs and screaming racial slurs. It was a massive shock to all of us. I had never realized just how pervasive and threatening hate is. It was a call to action that I would not ignore. This culture of bigotry in our world today will never disappear if we continue to stand by and give it free rein. We must take action in any way that we can and ensure that no family in the future has to feel unsafe in their own neighborhood. While I am uncertain of what exactly I want to do in the future, compassion, empathy, and kindness will always be the foundation for whatever I do.