I am writing this letter as an appeal for my admission decision for the fall of 2017. I would like you to reconsider my admission to UT Austin as biology major. In retrospect, I should have applied as a biology major in the first place.
My passion is biology and after spending last summer at UT Austin, conducting research with Dr. Palmer, I knew that UT Austin would be the best fit for me. I hope that the additional information I provide in this letter and the additional recommendations from Dr.Palmer and Mr. Gillam, my ISEF mentor, will assure the admissions committee that I am a qualified candidate for the biology program at the College of Natural Sciences. If I had taken the time to research the Biology Major at UT, I would have known that the Department of Molecular Biosciences has close associations with the Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, which would have offered me the strong foundation in both microbiology and computational sciences that I desired. I should have applied as
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You see, it was the Java based image processing program Imagej, that made it possible for me to complete my research on time for the International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) in 2016. I had six days to measure the bacterial colony areas of the control and variable groups of Gram positive and negative bacteria. Manual measuring was not an option. I therefore googled “image processing programs to measure bacterial colony area” and a research article in PLOS, High-Throughput Method for Automated Colony and Cell Counting by Digital Image Analysis Based on Edge Detection, described the development of ImageJ, exactly what I was looking for. I educated myself using Youtube tutorials and successfully used ImageJ for the area analysis and was able to present my results at the ISEF