“Wow, you’re amazing -- you’re a girl who codes! This is so cool!”, said the curly ginger guy from the stand opposing mine at the science fair. It was an innocent remark said with a smile and probably intended as a compliment, but its premise was ridiculous: female engineers and programmers are strange, rare creatures. Yet, it is true. A glance at the statistics shows that last year, there were four girls among the best 50 competitive programmers at...

Dartmouth's "extracurriculars and work experience" essay: wrote about my summer internship at a Boston start-up.

Princeton's "choose a quote and write about it" essay: wrote on what travelling has taught me, using the Ray Bradbury quote, “See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask for no guarantees, ask for no security.”

Harvard's "note to your future roommate" essay: wrote about the important/unusual things I do

1. I can teach you how to build a model of a pirate boat: this is one of the peculiar-sounding one-week workshops which I taught kids aged 8-13 during my two-month-long summer internship at Build-It-Yourself. By building their own pirates, flags, sails, and treasure chests, kids learned important engineering concepts, such as splitting a task into smaller modules, which are easier to build. I learned a lot about teaching, especially about finding the right metaphors so that my audience understood me....