<p>If you’re as anal and stat obsessive as I was, this might come in handy. This is what it takes to get in as an Asian male…</p>
<p>**Decision: Accepted - Vagelos Integrated Program In Energy Research/b]</p>
<p>Objective:[ul]</p>
<p>[<em>] SAT I (breakdown): 2400
[</em>] ACT: didn’t take
[<em>] SAT II: Bio 770, Physics 780, Math II 790
[</em>] Unweighted GPA (out of 4.0): 3.7, 93/100
[<em>] Rank (percentile if rank is unavailable): like bottom 1/3rd, my school was one of THE schools though
[</em>] AP (place score in parenthesis): Studio Art (4) Art History (5) Chem (5) Calc BC (5) Stat (3) yeah I know… Micro (4) Macro (5) WH (5) USH (5) Human Geo (5) EUH (5) there were like 5 more 5’s but I can’t remember off the top of my head
[<em>] IB (place score in parenthesis): none
[</em>] Senior Year Course Load: Multivar Calc, AP Physics, bunch of joke classes
[li] Major Awards (USAMO, Intel etc.): National AP Scholar, NYU InnoVention Semifinalist, Confucius Grant Recipient, National Merit Scholarship Finalist, nothing too crazy</p>[/li]
<p>[/ul]Subjective:[ul]</p>
<p>[<em>] Extracurriculars (place leadership in parenthesis): Chess team (captained to state championship, no money for nationals), Academic team (captained 1st place Yale FaCT finish) GSAC 5th place individual score, Founder/Captain of Teamspeak, interscholastic organization with branches in 3 states that sponsors a semipro videogaming team, Head Content Writer for the biggest online community for SMITE (another video game, we’re pretty much the official website for them…), Rock climbing, pathfinded a few ascents up the Andes and Shaanxi mountain ranges, nothing too crazy, qualified to go play MLG League of Legends XD
[</em>] Job/Work Experience: Spent two summers working at a radar company, ended up with the concept and preliminary design for a product that’s probably going to be worh 7 figures worldwide. Filed two patents dealing with fiber-optic gyroscopes.
[<em>] Volunteer/Community service: play violin in a state orchestra, bells in a local one. we do charity concerts about 8 times a year in total
[</em>] Summer Activities: see job, one summer spent studying chinese culture, lots of rock climbing
[<em>] Essays: I thought they were good, so probably decent at best. One was a garbage attempt at being poetic, the other was one giant humble brag about the radar thing. i’ll copy paste them down bottom in case anyone cares to read.
[</em>] Teacher Recommendation: Probably both generic, both kind of liked me but I don’t think any of them really knew me.
[<em>] Counselor Rec: Probably mediocre, I was kind of a trouble maker…
[</em>] Additional Rec: Nope
[<em>] Interview: I thought it was mediocre, but the lady told me after acceptance that she thought I was a perfect fit, so yay?
[</em>] Supplementary Material: Nada</p>
<p>[/ul]Other[ul]</p>
<p>[<em>] State (if domestic applicant):[</em>] Country (if international applicant):
[<em>] School Type: literally, the BEST.
[</em>] Ethnicity: yellow
[<em>] Gender: XY
[</em>] Income Bracket(mention if FA candidate): 60k before taxes
[li] Hooks (URM, first generation college, etc.): everyone wants more asian guys!</p>[/li]
<p>[/ul]Reflection[ul]</p>
<p>[<em>] Strengths: Decent hard scores, interesting and varied ECs some of which are pretty hardcore
[</em>] Weaknesses: garbage gpa, no real awards
[<em>] Why you think you were accepted/waitlisted/rejected: I recently converted to Christianity
[</em>] Where else were you accepted/waitlisted/rejected: everyyyyywhere yo. Cornell, Columbia, Chicago, Harvard, Yale, Princeton rejected.</p>
<p>[/ul]**General Comments: **
So utterly stoked. I know I don’t deserve this at all, but I’m going to take it and run with it. </p>
<p>Short Answer:</p>
<p>A Penn education provides a liberal arts and sciences foundation across multiple disciplines with a practical emphasis in one of four undergraduate schools: the College of Arts and Sciences, the School of Engineering and Applied Science, the School of Nursing, or the Wharton School.</p>
<p>Given the undergraduate school to which you are applying, please discuss how you will engage academically at Penn. (Please answer in 300 words or less.)</p>
<p>There was something about the UPenn admissions video that got to me, something about that kitschy mix of black and white film with everyday students. As it started singing to me, I knew I was hooked. The exuberance of the video reeled me in from the start; in Penn, I found a world-class research institution that felt like a small liberal-arts college.</p>
<p>I’m incredibly excited to be applying to the VIPER program because it gives me an opportunity to focus on two disparate fields, both of which intrigue me. At the SAS, I would get to learn directly from the team optimizing the SuperNova/Acceleration Probe which will provide data on the vacuum energy that surrounds us. The study of vacuum energy is a field that’s constantly breaking new ground and attending UPenn offers me a chance to conduct my own research on it in UPenn’s exhaustive facilities. </p>
<p>My other interest involves optimizing the efficiency of a Stirling engine. Theoretically the most energy efficient engine, it’s never been developed for mass production. With a degree in Mechanical Engineering from the SEAS, I would study the fluid dynamics of the gas being cycled through the Stirling engine and the other external forces that reduce the efficiency of an engine. </p>
<p>The true benefit of the VIPER program is that it takes these passions and channels them into ways to advance the global and local communities I exist in. Through freshmen seminars, I would explore the role of energy in the world around me while investigating the dilemmas we face. I want to work at one of the companies developing hyper-efficient Stirling engines through the VIPER summer internships. Amongst all this, UPenn offers me an opportunity to learn not just from the stellar teachers, but from the students and communities that surround me. </p>
<p>Essay:</p>
<p>Ben Franklin once said, ‘All mankind is divided into three classes: those that are immovable, those that are movable, and those that move.’</p>
<p>Which are you?</p>
<p>The willow that bends in the wind has nothing to fear from the storm. It’s one of my favorite proverbs and it’s guided my thoughts throughout most of my teenage years. As far as Benjamin Franklin’s classification system goes, I’d fall under the category of movable. I’m proud to be firm but not stubborn, quick but not rash. I make my decisions based around the best information I have at the time and I act upon it. If different information appears, then I’ll reconsider and if need be I’ll change my path. That is what flexibility means to me and it’s kept me intellectually honest. I say the things I believe in and I invite you to change my beliefs.</p>
<p>In a world where flip-flopping is the kiss of death for a politician, changing your opinion can be incredibly unpopular. I think that’s an incredibly shame (LOLOLOL HEY LOOK I MISSED A GRAMMAR MISTAKE >.>) because every time I change my opinions, they become more nuanced and specific. I was for mandatory deportation of illegal immigrants before I was against it, believing that it would be too costly to deport millions of undocumented immigrants. Then I learned about how difficult it is to get a visa to enter the United States legally and how companies can’t get the H1B1 visas they need to import skilled workers. At one of the largest technical conferences in Asia, I spoke with countless American HR managers who simply shrugged and told me that if they needed a qualified worker, they would pay for the worker to be smuggled into the US from overseas. If it failed, they’d just try again because there was no shortage of workers willing to come.</p>
<p>Let that sink in for a moment. It’s faster and cheaper to pay a gangster to load their worker into the bottom of a ship and have it sail across the Pacific to be unloaded a month later than to deal with it legally and there are consistently people willing to risk deportation for this chance at a new life. That was the moment that impressed upon me the need for immigration reform. And so the cycle continues. As the world moves me from one viewpoint to the next, I’d like to think that I’ve become a better, more rounded person by my ability to change my opinions. I can’t imagine what I would be like if I couldn’t accept new information and reevaluate my thoughts. Would I still believe in Santa Claus? </p>
<p>a. We are interested in what intrigues you personally about life sciences and management, and why. With that in mind, please discuss a scientific, technological, or health care-related issue you think is important, and tell us how it connects your future plans with the intersection of life sciences and management. Keep in mind that our goal is to understand what you are truly passionate about. (Please answer in one page, approximately 500 words.)</p>
<p>The engineering bug the desire to design, build, innovate, and tear it down to start all over, has been with me for a while. As a sophomore, I entered a competition to engineer a solution to a major world problem and after initial research, I was struck by just how many of them originated from a lack of clean, renewable energy. Across Africa and Asia, villagers chop down forests just to build fires for cooking and heating. Wars are fought over oil and peasants are displaced to build pipelines and dams. It’s horrifying how many problems stem from a single source.</p>
<p>In response, I built a Stirling engine powered by channeling sunlight through a Fresnel lens. A Stirling engine converts heat into mechanical energy with theoretically perfect efficiency and my version drew that heat from the sun. It cost as much to build as a decent dinner and it could be used anywhere the sun shined which made it perfect for third world countries. Unfortunately, I did this in the winter when New Jersey receives less sunlight than a buried vampire so I never did find out if the Fresnel lens worked.</p>
<p>It was the first setback I had come across. I never actually considered the possibility that there would be times you couldn’t rely on sunlight as a source of energy. Real world considerations were something that had never occurred to me before. I adapted by heating my engine with an ordinary kitchen stove. That probably violated every workplace safety code ever created, but on the bright side it heated up my engine enough for it to move.</p>
<p>At least, for a given definition of move. The engine was doing work at a percentage of the theoretical value which was humiliating to see, because you know, you could barely see it move. What should have been a steady alternation of pistons was reduced to an occasional whimpering of plastic. By my mental calculations, I would have gotten more energy out of that heat by growing rice on top of the stove.</p>
<p>That was where I learned to loathe the world theoretical. Nothing ever works as it theoretically should and you never get as much power out as you expect. I took my engine apart and went through every possible explanation for the loss of power. Heat loss through the sides of the container, friction within the pistons and the walls, the chemical composition of the air; none of it explained away the difference between the actual and the theoretical results. </p>
<p>Since that winter day, the Stirling engine has become my slight obsession and I’ve rebuilt it with varying designs about six times. My designs have gotten better, but I still haven’t been able to theoretically predict the power generated within twenty percent. My engine currently has six parts. The engines that engineers model have exponentially more components and they still predict the power generated. I have no clue how, but it’s the first thing I want to learn.</p>
<p>Common App:</p>
<p>Drip.
The next jump will be for three feet. A rock outcrop the size of my phone rests above my head, plopping water upon me in a macabre taunt. For the past hour, that drip has been etching its way into my skull as I angle for a better position.
Drip.
Every limb, coiled as tightly as I can wind. My hands are slick with sweat and rain. One leg turns inward and rests on a jut smaller than a Reese’s; the other is bent so far the knee touches my chest.
Drip.
I breathe. I release. Suddenly, every muscle is twisting, screaming, bursting. Three limbs push away from the rock wall and a fourth reaches for the heavens.
Then, flight. And for one horrible moment, I wish I had used a harness. My fingers catch the offshoot just before gravity catches me. I can feel my gut loosen. This time, a breath of relief. Exhilaration.
Drip.
Another drop falls on me. There are about fifty more jumps just like that one along this path up the cliff face.
Just another day. Just another climb.
Drip.</p>
<pre><code>I spent the last two weeks of my employment in a radar company on a personal project. It involved using company radar, cameras, facial-recognition software, and applied calculus to take pictures of the undersides of moving trains and compare them to older pictures. If an accident-causing alien object was detected, the railways would be alerted, thereby automating the manual inspection of each train. There were no noble or financial underpinnings to any of this; I was simply seeing how far I could take my idea.
Cool in concept, but difficult to execute in reality. After the first fourteen hour workday, they gave me a set of company keys so I could lock up afterward. Lunch was eaten amongst piles of defunct code and dinner was always water. For two weeks I rolled that boulder uphill and every day it came crashing back down right on top of my smoldering transistors. And I do mean smoldering. Have you ever set off the fire alarm so many times that the firefighters stopped coming?
I failed, of course. I don’t know if you were expecting some kind of plot twist, but this isn’t that kind of essay. At the time all I felt was a twinge of remorse. The disappointment was filed away for future use as a parable; perhaps I had bitten off more than I could chew and washed it down with crow.
Bright summer days were laid to rest and eventually the blare of school bells and alarm clocks flooded the sound of my failures (it’s sort of a dull thonk). Any residual guilt from half-whispered memories vanishes when life is rushing past you and your calculator has just stopped working on the first multi-variable calculus test of the year. My failures were allotted an occasional passing thought.
Like a blurry lens, those faded memories snapped back into focus when I heard about the high-speed rail crash in China. Over two hundred people were paying for the mistakes of others. In a postmortem autopsy, those mistakes would be analyzed and dissected in sterile rooms detached from the grief they had caused. Eventually lessons would be drawn, but it was too late for those passengers. Even if we learn from our mistakes, we still have a responsibility to correct them.
My connection with high-speed rail is tenuous at best, but the news floored me because I had worked in the field of preventing just that. For the first time in my life, I had the power to reach out and touch the headlines. If my efforts could save just one life in the future, then all the time spent would be worth it. That was when I decided I was going to finish my project.
In between chess, academic team, rock-climbing, musical groups, and all the things called life, I eked out fifteen minutes here and there to work on it. Ten months after I first started, I sent my finished patent application back to the company for them to produce and now product knockoffs are marketed around the globe (the surest sign of success). The world stands a little safer because I corrected my mistakes. I’m proud that we’ll never know what they could have cost.
</code></pre>
