“I haven’t eaten yet, but I’ll take some fruit to the car.” My twelve-year-old self then witnessed a shift in my father’s face as his jaw slacked and his light blue eyes snapped to mine. Fear bubbled to my throat when I saw that cold gaze. In one bound, a monster’s face was before me, claws tightening beneath my chin, making me see stars as they threatened to wring my head from my shoulders because I...

Northwestern It was like walking on holy ground. The fluorescent lights exposed technology that gleamed from wall to wall and though Dr. Marfuggi encouraged us to look closer, I was wary of the atmosphere. After some instruction, I gingerly stepped to the nearest footstool and grasped a hemostat in each hand, ready to compete using the laparoscopic training system. The exercise used little triangular pencil grips placed on a nail board, and the objective was to transfer all 10 pencil grips...

What interests you? I was researching fractional derivatives during an internet search for a project for Calculus class when I became distracted by their visual renderings: Fractal Images. Impressed by the beauty and symmetry of the visuals in the Julia set, with its swirls on a rhombus-shaped plane, I did more investigating. Apparently, fractals conceptualize randomness through systematic recursions and phenomena of self-similarity. More searching revealed that even simpler mathematical sets such as Fibonacci also produce images with self-similarity, and...

Who would you pose this question to: If you could do one thing and you were guaranteed to succeed, what would you do? I would pose this question to Nikolai Tesla. He is notorious for having ideas stolen and concepts seen as ludicrous though he often had honorable goals for society. I wonder if he would want a failed project to succeed, or if he would want a social success entirely unrelated to his experiments. How would he weigh the...

Discouraged, exhausted, and 12 years old, I climbed out the window and escaped into an endless night sky. My accomplishments had begun materializing, but self-doubt followed every failure, no matter how rare one occurred. I grasped the value of education at a young age and developed the reputation I desired for myself, but I did not feel fulfilled by my hard work. I studied for hours on end during Gifted and Talented programs at Michigan State, yet when I fell behind...

I have piles of essays and short answers from all schools applied to! The main theme of the essays posted have to do with my personal life, a risk I took that paid off in the end. I find that there is a specific way to explain a hard home life and additional ways to paint your past as a ladder to the future as opposed to a speed bump :) Eloquence and word choice can make or break an admissions...

Greek is widespread! I also advise finding a...

My favorite...

Hard-working, stressed,...

I did not! Couldn't...

I am interested in working...

Start early! Build rapport with teachers beginning your freshman year. I used my Calculus...

Lovely weather and...