“Uday Jain?” “Present Ma’am!” “Varun Sharma?” “Present Ma’am.” “Veome Kapil?” It took a few seconds of awkward silence for me to finally respond. 2 years since the storm had passed, and I still hadn’t gotten used to hearing that name. ‘Kapil’. This 5 lettered word seemed to owe its existence to a cruel prank; every time I heard it, my mind wandered to the man who mistreated my mother and catalyzed the drastic turn my life had taken. The...

“One of the great challenges of our time is that the disparities we face today have more complex causes and point less straightforwardly to solutions.” Omar Wasow, assistant professor of politics, Princeton University; founder of Blackplanet.com. This quote is taken from Professor Wasow’s January 2014 speech at the Martin Luther King Day celebration at Princeton University. Politics and I have never been the best of friends. But once every 5 years, I am compelled to wake from the slumber of...

The first rays of the Sun shine through the window of my room in Stever House. I grab a quick cup of coffee, and I’m off. 33-224: Stars, Galaxies and the Universe. With a Physics major at MCS, every day is an adventure; and yet walking down Forbes Ave, something feels different. Perhaps it’s the excitement that bubbles up when I think of today’s lecture by Professor Peterson. For once, my dream of uncovering the farthest enigmas...

Q. Describe how you have taken advantage of a significant educational opportunity or worked to overcome an educational barrier you have faced. Step 1: Place Metal in a Forge. For the better part of my school life in India, I had studied in the CBSE curriculum. For the uninitiated, CBSE was the result of archaic bureaucrats seeking to make childrens’ lives miserable- or so it seemed. Step 2: Heat the Metal until it is glowing red. The problem wasn’t in the �...

Q. Every person has a creative side, and it can be expressed in many ways: problem solving, original and innovative thinking, and artistically, to name a few. Describe how you express your creative side. I felt it crawling through my veins as I eyeballed the desk. An eerie silence had befallen the room. Stacks of newspaper higher than the eye could see, scattered remains of old cardboard victims, an array of cutting tools that could put Freddy Krueger to shame. ...

There are about 800 million students in the entire world. Roughly 14 million of these may love playing the guitar as much as they love physics, mastering the balance between academic excellence and artistic creativity. About 1 million of them may be extreme movie and TV fanatics, wielding an arsenal of pop culture references in their holster at all times. 723 thousand may want to dedicate their life to the exploration of the furthest expanses of space, and forever change human understanding of the...

Q. Describe your favorite academic subject and explain how it has influenced you. *Reload* Nothing. *Reload* Nothing. They say insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. *Reload* I didn’t care. It was a Friday night, and the latest episode of PBS Spacetime could come out any second. Nothing. The 7 days separating each episode had never seemed this long; almost like some mysterious phenomenon had slowed down time. Hmm… The last episode had posed...

The washed out light from my laptop filled the room. *Click* I felt like a nomad, aimlessly wandering the expanse of the internet. But not even the infinite spectacle of YouTube managed to distract me from the truth- it was summer, and I was bored. *Click* BBC, India Today, LA Times- I’d been around the world in 80 minutes when I finally landed at The New Yorker. The top story: Dr. James M. Tour’s revolutionary work on Graphene. *Click*...