The Engineer’s Dilemma: College Admission Essay Sample

Maggi is desire. Maggi is beautiful. There are few things I wouldn’t give up to have Maggi. Just so things are clear - Maggi is a brand of instant noodles.

Every night in our dormitories, my friends and I used my kettle and cooked up exactly these noodles. In twelfth grade this became a ritual, and every night, after a long and tiring day, we would just sit together and share laughs and steaming bowls of Maggi. All was great, until the day we discovered that our kettle had started over-heating quickly, and always got shut off by its automatic over-heating mechanism. We were crestfallen, until I decided it was time to find a solution.

I sat down with the kettle and a set of screwdrivers. While I proceeded to unscrew all the screws holding the outer shell of the kettle together, I mentally tried to track all the wires in the kettle. They formed convoluted, weird patterns which were frustrating to figure out. I wanted to get a look at the internal heating system of the kettle, but it was welded shut. This was even more frustrating. Some screws were difficult to reach and the constant twisting of the screwdriver was taking a toll; my fingers ached and I needed to strain my eyes to see what I was doing in the dim light of my table lamp. My friends also kept giving input, on occasion. One of them had a physics book open on his lap, and was reading aloud the text on parallel and series circuits and the various components of said circuits. Even though it helped, for some incomprehensible reason, reading from a book seemed so much easier than practically working out the mechanism.

My plan was to find the wire which activated the over-heating system, so that I could cut it and disable the system. After spending half an hour hunched over the kettle, I finally decided upon a wire and cut it off. Someone passed me some water to put into the kettle. Someone fidgeted excitedly. Everyone sent up silent prayers to whatever God exists. And I plugged in the kettle and turned the switch on. Half a minute passed. A minute. Two minutes. The water reached full boil, and yet the kettle kept roaring on. We chimed in with the kettle with roars of our own, embracing each other as if our favorite team just won the World Cup. That night, Maggi graced the occasion again.

This ‘obstacle’ may seem trivial to most, but to me it holds tremendous value. I’ve always had a proclivity for tinkering with machines and mechanics, but this was the first time I tried to solve a problem in a machine. It reinforced my faith in pursuing Mechanical Engineering as a career, as I love machines and their intricacies. Mechanical Engineers can contribute things of value to society, which is exactly what I want to do. I wasn’t deterred when I was having trouble with the kettle; I’d rather say it only motivated me further to find the solution. I loved every minute of it, and the feeling of success one experiences when one sees an innovation work out well is truly amazing. Thus not only is Maggi pleasing to the palate, but also led me to an obstacle which made me surer about my choices for higher education. Cheers to Maggi!