Palms, Passes, and PCR They say the only rule of magic is to never tell the audience the secret of the trick. But Wu never cared about rules. "There," he says, his eyes holding a roguish glint, "is that your card?" Disbelief is supposedly a mental state. Yet for me it manifests physically. Shivers trace the slope of my shoulders, up my neck, to my cheeks. The room is suddenly warm, and I can feel my face flushing. My reality...

Dartmouth Essay: The timer buzzes insistently, signaling my turn to speak. What can I say? Silence. Nothing. "Do you need more prep-time?" drawls the judge, who is perched coolly on the desk across from me. Finally, I let my voice fill the silence. "Judge, my opponents — they — you — they're arguing that — um —" I'm incoherent. I stop, consumed by the failure of the moment. As a dedicated news junkie, I had initially imagined debate to be a contest of raw volume....

Columbia Essay: I want to devote my life to solving problems. At Columbia, I see a community uniquely committed to the challenge. I love Columbia's dedication to undergraduate research. I hope to find my spot among the 400 research positions reserved just for undergraduates. I would love to engage in research in a SURF program to pursue a deeper understanding of biology. In particular, I hope to work with the researchers at the Department of Systems Biology. The Department's High-Throughput Molecular...

Favorite Films, Shows, and Musical Artists: Films Mad Max: Fury Road; Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens; Inside Out; The Theory of Everything Live Concerts The Glass Animals, Matt and Kim, Bear Hands, Civil Twilight, Cake Shows The Great War, The Late Show, The Daily Show Musical Artists Chance the Rapper, Childish Gambino, Tame Impala, Grouplove, ODESZA, Rizzle Kicks, Mura Masa, Vicetone, Thomas Hayden, Big Gigantic, PHANTOGRAM, Duke Dumont, Klangkarussell, Electric Mantis, Point Point, Nora En Pure, Bondax, Mark...

Most Commonly Read Sources: Newspapers/News Sources The New York Times, NPR, The Guardian, BBC, The Washington Post, Reuters, PBS, Bloomberg News, The Atlantic, CNN, The Economist Websites Reddit (http://www.reddit.com/); StumbleUpon (http://www.stumbleupon.com); Quora (http://www.quora.com/); The Onion (http://www.theonion.com/); Medium (http://www.medium.com/); Marginal Revolution (http://www.marginalrevolution.com/); A List Apart (http://www.alistapart.com/); Ars Technica (http://www.arstechnica.com/) Magazines/Journals Wired, Scientific American, New Scientist,...

Favorite Books: Foundation and Earth, Isaac Asimov; Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond; Collapse, Jared Diamond; Genome, Matt Ridley; The Martian, Andy Weir; Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman; The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas; One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey

Assigned Reading in the Past Year: Short Stories "The Gilded Six-Bits," Zora Neale Hurston; "How John Boscoe Outsung the Devil," Arthur P. Davis; "Exodus," James Baldwin; "The Goophered Grapevine," Charles Waddell Chesnutt; "Truant," Claude McKay; "The City of Refuge," Rudolph Fisher; "The Lynching of Jube Benson," Paul Lawrence Dunbar Anthologies A Century of the Best African American Short Stories, edited by John Henrik Clarke; The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry, edited by Arnold Rampersad Books What Was African American Literature?,...

What draws you to the fields you listed? Entering kindergarten, I insisted (to my parents' great amusement) on donning a white lab coat as often as possible. At the time, of course, I had difficulty articulating exactly why, at five years old, I was certain that I wanted to be a neurosurgeon. Today, though I'm less precisely sure of that career choice, I still find biology fascinating. I'm rapt by its mysteries, its complexities; its harrowing diseases, its triumphs of...

Cornell Essay: I've spent much of my time in high school at the lab bench. Initially, my experience was driven entirely by intense curiosity. Something as complex as liver cancer cell signaling naturally pulls me in. It's an incredible challenge. I feel obligated to continue probing, searching, fighting for a deeper answer. Yet week after week, as I worked the cancer cells in my hands, I began to feel an intuition for the awful potential of these tiny enigmas. Cancer...

UC Berkeley: When I was younger, my parents read a book to me every night. We cycled through the bookshelf every couple of weeks, but we always returned to the books with the yellow covers, now warped by repeated use: Curious George. The plot of each book is mostly identical. George is an unruly, lovable monkey who grows curious, does something mischievous, and gets in trouble. Yet, somehow, he usually emerges a hero. In "Curious George Goes to the Hospital,"...