A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn changed my life. The book’s pages teem with America’s historical transgressions, but none of them sparked my indignation more than the story of Christopher Columbus.  I never gave Columbus a thought beyond “Columbus sailed the ocean blue” until I read about how he exploited the indigenous population of Hispaniola. According to Zinn, the Spaniards treated the natives with such brutality and contempt that they wiped out their...

Although I am passionate about neuroscience and computing, I also care about social justice. Brown is the ideal school for me because of its culture of progressive activism. I was inspired to lead a campaign for Indigenous People’s Day in my town because of Brown’s initiative. I imagine myself thriving among the passionate and devoted people at Brown. Brown also has some of the best neuroscience and computer science departments in the world. With the flexibility of Brown�...

I want to study the intersection of computer science and neuroscience because I am fascinated by how computing can be used to model and study the brain. This summer, as a lab assistant in a Yale neuroscience lab under Marvin Chun, I made my own small research contribution. I demonstrated that brain scan data taken over short intervals of time from attention experiments can be used to predict a person’s performance on the attention task. It was no watershed...