My second day of a summer of research at Mahidol University in Bangkok, Thailand, I awoke to a knock at my door. It was my advisor, a Thai woman named P’Be, informing me that I would have a “conference” that morning. Confused, I boarded the bus for the hour-long commute from my dorm to the lab, where I was quickly rushed to a room of reporters and promptly bombarded with questions. Lost in translation had been the word “press.”...

Stanford: What matters to you and why? In my room, I have two clocks. one glares at me from a bookshelf and has the unenviable task of waking me up in the morning. The other is my partner, nestled on my desk between textbooks and a lamp that I carved out of a gourd in the third grade. Time matters to me. When I was younger, I noticed that an hour of reading is a minute, an empty hour is...

Stanford: Write a letter to your roommate: At birth I was blessed (or cursed, if you ask my parents) with a powerful set of lungs, but lacked the ability to hear. At first, my constant ear infections and delayed speech were a mess of confusion. Then, a doctor identified my otitis media, a build-up of fluid that rendered my middle ear nearly unusable, and remedied it with an operation. Since I entered the world of sound at the age of...

Stanford: Write about an experience important to your intellectual vitality: The Soy Info Center is a database and resource center for science and businesses. As an intern, I assist in reading, summarizing, and compiling documents into books for publication. One day, while my manager and I were deep in the threshes of writing History of Natto and Its Relatives (1405-2012), I reviewed a document about methods of growing Natto, a traditional Japanese food made from soybeans. As I annotated neatly...