Up until three years ago, I had always believed that to make a serious difference in a person’s life, I would have to cure cancer, or save someone from a burning building; it would have to be life altering. In fact, if someone asked me what my future goals were, I would have said with total conviction that I wanted to make a major contribution to humanity. During my freshman year, I was lounging in the computer lab when...

As a prospective engineering student, I originally didn’t think the CORE curriculum would be useful; in fact, I’m embarrassed to say that I thought that studying other cultures, literature, and history wouldn’t benefit me at all. However, when I worked on an engineering project to design an inexpensive toilet for Sub-Saharan Africa, we needed to understand the whole scope of the problem, including culture, economy, and even religion. In some regions, religion dictates that people should squat...