My Motivation to Study at Cornell’s College of Engineering

Here I am. Officially applying to Cornell’s College of Engineering. I think back to my early childhood where it all started.

Maths, music, and science were all part of my earliest memories. My father used to always feed me information about science in surroundings alongside showing me fun number tricks. There was always an ongoing discussion in my family about how things work and, thus, sparked my initial interest in science. My fascination in the roots of engineering was further fuelled by the toys and books I was exposed to early on in life. Here, I started dreaming of becoming an engineer. My school’s recommendation, based upon my intellectual ability demonstrated in class, was to undertake a WISC IV test. Based upon my FSIQ score of 144 with a percentile of 99. 8%, I was accelerated a year ahead in Year 4. It was in Year 6 when I was first exposed to online learning platforms such as Coursera and EdX and undertook a few advanced maths courses. During my early high school years, I was part of a school team participating in “The da Vince Decathlon” competition ranking 2nd nationally. I was accelerated for a second time in middle school. When science itself split into different streams, I found myself more and more drawn to physics. I challenged myself to take advanced maths and physics as well as a university level engineering maths subject in Year 11 itself. In studying the applications of maths and science, my passion for physics and mathematics slowly evolved into engineering.

My interest in computer science stemmed from the elementary level courses I did in my primary years. Scratch gave me first hand exposure to programming. Later in high school, I took additional courses from online learning portals about programming and database concepts. These courses helped me recognise the power of computation and the depth of computation. This year, I had the opportunity to work as an intern in a research project with Dr. Jennifer Flegg. It is a yearlong project based on modelling the spread of infectious diseases. The aim was to understand the basics of deterministic and stochastic modelling in relation to the disease Ebola. I had to make use of my programming and mathematical skills to interpret the dynamics of the population spread of Ebola and how the two types of models can unveil the mechanics in detail. At the core of this internship was the exposure to the applied side of mathematics and computer science. I learnt the toolkit of applied mathematical techniques required to tackle various problems encountered in real-world modelling and reducing real world problems into mathematical solutions. This internship helped me understand that such real-life problems can be mapped by mathematical patterns and be modelled accordingly. Likewise, chaos can be interpreted similarly. To solve such problems, apart from mathematical knowledge, massive and efficient computational skills is required. Scientists and engineers are, more than ever, relying on this process to steer their experimental work. Mathematical modelling also introduced me to deep machine learning, AI and data science. My strengths in problem solving, logical analysis and building algorithms are closely related to these fields. Cornell has an excellent computer science faculty specifically, it has one of the leading AI groups in the world. Most notably, Cornell is unique amongst the top computing departments whereby students can undertake research in both theoretical and applied areas.

I look forward to work within some of the AI, computational biology & scientific computing research groups. Cornell’s scientific computing group is in collaboration with the Applied Mathematics Ph. D. program where I could pursue a higher degree in applied mathematics. Some of the world’s greatest minds are amongst Cornell’s alumina showing the quality education it has provided over the years. The cutting-edge CS department alongside its world class teaching facility will enable me to fulfil my dream and become an engineer.