With my thumb poised on the clicker, I take a deep breath and start our presentation: "CollabWear: a marketplace that connects emerging designers with consumers and manufacturers to upend the fashion industry." Four weeks earlier, I was dragging two suitcases along the pavement when I mangled the door open into Simmons Hall. My stomach churned, half-expecting to be turned away, told that my acceptance to MIT Launch had been a mistake. Yet my heart was anxious to meet my forty-one...

I love to build. I love to turn the chaos of gears, the clamor of clacking keys, and slivers of wood into fascinating contraptions: a robot that sorts balls by weight, an app that creates the most effective volleyball practice routines, and model bridges that hold one thousand times their weight. My love for engineering manifested itself from an early age through sore thumbs from K'nex parts and mine fields of Legos. I recall bouncing up and down at the...

I started my essays in December, and didn't want to change a lot based on feedback because I felt...

Science...

Columbia was my dream school for years, but when I visited Caltech I felt...

The fact that I had started two clubs: the...

I used a private college...