There were plenty of places I thought I’d be by the time I was sixteen. In school? Definitely. Working at my temple? Sure, no problem. But sitting in my bathroom with a box of purple hair dye, watching in the mirror as my mother carefully painted it onto my hair? That hadn’t quite been on the agenda. Somehow, there I was, with the sickly-sweet smell of Splat! Lusty Lavender filling my nose as I tried to rub the...

When I was thirteen, I had an idea: I was going to learn to play the guitar. It wasn’t so much the sound of the instrument that attracted me, as the idea that putting my fingers in certain places could change the sound of the strings—I wanted to see how the guitar worked. Since then, I have also taken up the ukulele, the mandolin, and even the banjo, for the most part just to see how they differ...

For me, it really helped to have spent a weekend at CMU. They ask for a pretty long essay-- a full page, single spaced, so it was important to have enough to talk about. That's why I worked a little bit of a personal story in there, as well as name-dropping professors and research groups.

For me, as a STEM major-to-be, the most important part of crafting my applications was to make them interdisciplinary. I didn’t want the admissions committee to see me as a science robot, or someone with no emotional...

I've noticed a lot of people going for Scotch N Soda, the theater group which I'm a part of, but groups like Engineers without Borders...

I'd pick...

I love my introduction to biomedical engineering course with Professor Chase-- it's...

CMU has an alumni interview program on campus, which I participated in. My interviewer was a computer science graduate, who told me that he "didn't like to talk to people." That made the interview itself pretty hard. He kept telling me...