College Admissions Essay: Building Spaces
I used to build spaceships.
They were quite mesmerizing, really, the kind of flying wonders a child could not glance at without imagining the bold brass Star Wars fanfare. Of course, I was not limited to just spaceships; although my first works consisted of cars, trains, and other relatively basic creations, I eventually acquired the expertise to even recreate the Empire State Building. To my ten-year-old self, the fact that my (comparable tiny) models were made of molded blocks of plastic rather than steel and glass did not diminish my achievement in the least. In elementary school, my room was dedicated to LEGOs. Stepping over its threshold transported me into a world of nearly infinite possibilities; with
LEGOs, I could make almost anything. On …show more content…
the carpet stretched a sprawling city, a bizarre mixture of medieval Roman buildings and urban skyscrapers.
In the vicinity, Hogwarts and the Black Pearl, emanating magic and mystery, stood adjacent to a fully functional roller coaster. High on a shelf above rested an entire fleet of spacecrafts, poised as if ready to launch into the heavens at any moment. I was particularly fond of imagining myself in one of those spaceships, soaring so high that the earth became a beautiful marble.
After school, I would sometimes kneel for hours, sifting through thousands of pieces to find the perfect one for each step of my construction. I didn't really play with my completed works; instead, I set them aside for my personal admiration. Every once in a while, I would stop and gaze at them, amazed by how such unremarkable plastic blocks could form something so powerfully breathtaking. Fast forward seven years.
My medieval town is buried under so much dust that it resembles Pompeii. My skyscrapers were destroyed long ago when one of my planes crash landed.
Memories of the glorious, golden armada I was once so proud of lay submerged under the ever-increasing depth of schoolwork, only resurfacing during rare discoveries of a piece of space debris in the vacuum
cleaner.
Although LEGOs no longer fascinate me, I am still, in some ways, exactly the same. Instead of erecting towers and castles, I now assemble computer programs, and I approach this with the same drive.
It was 3:00 AM on a school night, but my desk lamp was still on. Although this may seem like a nightmare, I was wide awake, competing in Google's Code Jam programming contest. As I work, each piece of code is meticulously selected after sifting through thousands of ideas. Each design is mentally rotated like planning an urban landscape. Each variable is scrutinized for its suitability, each algorithm analyzed for its efficiency. Before my computer, like kneeling on my carpet, I build tirelessly.
Ever since completing my first program (which printed "Hello World" to the screen), I knew that I had stumbled into a world of infinite possibilities.
With computer programming, you can make anything. You can erect a vast metropolis in the sky, efficiently housing, managing, and protecting centuries of data. You can construct a virtual reality filled with your most ridiculous dreams, your wildest fantasies. You can engineer the artificial intelligence technology capable of launching mankind's prospects through the clouds, over the moon, into the shimmering, silver stars above.
I believe that if my construction is sound, that if I soar in computer science,
I can bring such ideas to life, just as my imagination came to life in my LEGO blocks. Although I have only created relatively basic programs so far, I believe that, given the resources at higher quality education, I will eventually acquire the expertise to construct the Empire State
Building-something of record-breaking height. So I continue to code, hoping that in seven more years I can build something to share with the world, something the whole world can stop and gaze at, amazed by how such unremarkable blocks of code could form something so breathtakingly powerful.
They were quite mesmerizing, really, the kind of flying wonders a child could not glance at without imagining the bold brass Star Wars fanfare. Of course, I was not limited to just spaceships; although my first works consisted of cars, trains, and other relatively basic creations, I eventually acquired the expertise to even recreate the Empire State Building. To my ten-year-old self, the fact that my (comparable tiny) models were made of molded blocks of plastic rather than steel and glass did not diminish my achievement in the least. In elementary school, my room was dedicated to LEGOs. Stepping over its threshold transported me into a world of nearly infinite possibilities; with
LEGOs, I could make almost anything. On …show more content…
the carpet stretched a sprawling city, a bizarre mixture of medieval Roman buildings and urban skyscrapers.
In the vicinity, Hogwarts and the Black Pearl, emanating magic and mystery, stood adjacent to a fully functional roller coaster. High on a shelf above rested an entire fleet of spacecrafts, poised as if ready to launch into the heavens at any moment. I was particularly fond of imagining myself in one of those spaceships, soaring so high that the earth became a beautiful marble.
After school, I would sometimes kneel for hours, sifting through thousands of pieces to find the perfect one for each step of my construction. I didn't really play with my completed works; instead, I set them aside for my personal admiration. Every once in a while, I would stop and gaze at them, amazed by how such unremarkable plastic blocks could form something so powerfully breathtaking. Fast forward seven years.
My medieval town is buried under so much dust that it resembles Pompeii. My skyscrapers were destroyed long ago when one of my planes crash landed.
Memories of the glorious, golden armada I was once so proud of lay submerged under the ever-increasing depth of schoolwork, only resurfacing during rare discoveries of a piece of space debris in the vacuum
cleaner.
Although LEGOs no longer fascinate me, I am still, in some ways, exactly the same. Instead of erecting towers and castles, I now assemble computer programs, and I approach this with the same drive.
It was 3:00 AM on a school night, but my desk lamp was still on. Although this may seem like a nightmare, I was wide awake, competing in Google's Code Jam programming contest. As I work, each piece of code is meticulously selected after sifting through thousands of ideas. Each design is mentally rotated like planning an urban landscape. Each variable is scrutinized for its suitability, each algorithm analyzed for its efficiency. Before my computer, like kneeling on my carpet, I build tirelessly.
Ever since completing my first program (which printed "Hello World" to the screen), I knew that I had stumbled into a world of infinite possibilities.
With computer programming, you can make anything. You can erect a vast metropolis in the sky, efficiently housing, managing, and protecting centuries of data. You can construct a virtual reality filled with your most ridiculous dreams, your wildest fantasies. You can engineer the artificial intelligence technology capable of launching mankind's prospects through the clouds, over the moon, into the shimmering, silver stars above.
I believe that if my construction is sound, that if I soar in computer science,
I can bring such ideas to life, just as my imagination came to life in my LEGO blocks. Although I have only created relatively basic programs so far, I believe that, given the resources at higher quality education, I will eventually acquire the expertise to construct the Empire State
Building-something of record-breaking height. So I continue to code, hoping that in seven more years I can build something to share with the world, something the whole world can stop and gaze at, amazed by how such unremarkable blocks of code could form something so breathtakingly powerful.