Breh, the majority of your essay was to point out black problems/animosity growing up and "oh btw, I want to be an Engineer" but okay. My bad. If you really want to hear about your essay, I don't it did much of anything aside from express your angst from experiences coming up. For all your focus on the black community, there's virtually nothing to go on that truly says something about you. As an individual, as an aspiring _____ Engineer, etc. It mainly comes off as an attempt to magnify said problems, in bringing your peers down you expect the prospects to be brought up. You're "different". Anyways, I'm assuming you made it in?
Yeah I just got my acceptance a few days ago. I understand why it sounds weird for me to just throw in that I want to be an engineer at the end. This was actually the second essay I wrote so it makes more sense in the context of the first.
Here it is in case anyone's curious.
My closest friends would probably describe me as young, daring, adventurous, and sometimes crazy. They frequently remind me of how lucky I am to have such an anything-is-possible high-on-life attitude. When I was in seventh grade I told all my friends just as Pinky and the Brain did that one day I was going to “try to take over the world.” Now that I’m wiser than I was before, I realize there’s no point in trying to shoot for stars that high, but I would similarly like to have a very well rounded deep understanding of the world and everything in it.
Lately within the past year or so I have kind of had this vision where the world ends and I'm one of the few lucky survivors. I could picture myself walking through downtown Dallas with my friends, looking up at all the tall, empty, broken down skyscrapers and deserted cars parked in the street. I wonder if I was in that situation what could I do to help rebuild the earth?
This is why I want to learn more about technology besides knowing how to surf the web and how to text really fast. I would like to think of myself as a useful human being with skills we could all take advantage of for the betterment of mankind. Buildings, bridges, and entire infrastructures would have to be rebuilt from the ground up.
And it’s not only about rebuilding what we had lost but about maintaining and passing on to future generations everything mankind has accomplished so far. How sad would it be if generations down the line somehow lost the technology to travel in space? All the machines and tools necessary could be in working order, but without an actual person who knows how to operate it the International Space Station would be reduced to nothing more than a fancy mobile sculpture orbiting the earth.
But of course, beyond these whimsical hypotheticals, I believe I do have a purpose in life. This purpose was not beset upon me by something greater than myself, but rather a calling to a path I have paved by my own insight from my past and present experience with the world. I think every one of us, just by the fact that we’re human beings and can communicate through language, has the potential to make some sort of impact on this earth. Maybe not necessarily on a global scale like legislating international policy, but at least on the level of positively changing someone’s life for the better. In a broad sense, that is my purpose in life.
I want to be a computer engineer, perhaps working on the forefront of technology through research or design. Computers in this day and age are highly functional in some ways, and yet completely inadequate in other ways. A computer can make many mathematical calculations in a nanosecond but if you told a robot to clean your room it wouldn’t know what to do without some sort of prearranged instructions. Computers can process sensory information but they can’t truly learn, make their own decisions, or ask unique questions that no one else in the world had thought of before. These are problems I can see myself tackling by the way of innovation and engineering principles I learn at the Cockrell School of Engineering.
Improving lives through technology is only half the battle I’m looking at thus far. When I become an engineer or a doctor I hope to take full advantage of my success by inspiring other kids to learn more about science too. This sort of drive to inspire others is why I occasionally tag along with my mom, a substitute teacher for Dallas schools, when she teaches middle school math.
One day I was in a class teaching math when at some point the overhead projector broke so I had to write on the whiteboard in the corner of the classroom. These kids were hard to get a handle on so only the kids in that corner of the class were paying attention to what we were doing, especially since class was about to end. But I remember showing an example of how to solve two linear equations and I couldn’t have picked a better example to show how math really works.
As we solved for X, it turned out that X could actually be any number. One girl who was unfamiliar with such a conclusion spoke up, asking if the problem was beyond the scope of the class. I laughed and told her no, simply because if she understood what was going on then that’s all that mattered.
We made up a number for X and used it to solve for Y, which turned out to be 5. So I said ok if we did everything right, we should be able to make up any number for X, plug it into the other equation, and it should still give us y = 5. The bell rang so I hurriedly made the calculation which yielded the intended result y = 5. The same girl who spoke up earlier said “Woooow… that’s sooo freaky!” She was amazed! Absolutely stunned at how it all added up together. That was one the biggest light bulb moments I’ve ever seen in my life and I know exactly what she felt because I’ve been in that situation so many times.
So I want to learn as much as I can about technology and the earth in general, because not only does it fascinate me but someone has to do it if we want to keep progressing in the future. Studying computer engineering at The University of Texas at Austin will provide me with that first step onto a journey of technological innovation and worldwide discovery.
