College Admission Essay

My interest in science started when I was in high school. After preparing myself to become a pre-law major, I realized what my major passion was in the middle of my senior year. Not caring at all, I registered for a general physics course with a new teacher. He taught me and the rest of my classmates exciting lectures about mechanics, thermodynamics, electricity, and of course, the quantum world. Until this day, I always remembered the amazing times I had when I first learned about how planes fly and how they drop bombs from the sky. I loved it when we watched videos on how US Navy vessels can float on the ocean and not sink. I also enjoyed how we watched superhero videos on subatomic particles and how each electron has a mind of their own

The year was 2010. It was the year I started college, and I wanted to make it the beginning year of the best experiences of my life. For that reason, I enrolled in Onondaga Community College (OCC) to major in Mathematics and Science to give me a simple taste of what college should be as a real science major. What OCC has taught me is that college is more than an institution of learning, but it is the building blocks to higher achievement. With hard work, taking chances, and little mistakes, I realized that college is a place where a former senior in high school can explore. Taking classes like Calculus 1 and Physics 1, I aimed to be ambitious by tackling the world with my mind a mere freshman. Getting accepted to the Collegiate Science and Technological Entry Program (CSTEP) at the school allowed me to accomplish a part of my goals for the program gave me support from its advising sessions, tutoring assistance, and suggestions on what’s the next after graduation. My freshman year at OCC not only gave me an understanding what physics was, but made me realize that I can actually do physics. Thanks to OCC and the CSTEP program, I also got to tack on new challenges of my life such as being an Aerospace Scholar, and working on my first internship at Cornell University. Because of what my community college has done for me, I felt that I

It was difficult for me because not only that I was the new student at a new school, but I was a new student in a new state. As sophomore year became unbearable, I remembered the advice of what the CSTEP program gave me before I left New York to become a Meyerhoff Scholar. With that in mind, I was able to apply to their affiliate program and became a member of a large supporting community that was willing to help me achieve my goals similar to the CSTEP program. Thanks to the Meyerhoff Scholarship Program, not only was I able to do well at UMBC, I was able to work in various labs on campus in the field of physics and engineering. So far, my influential research experience was when I worked in Center for Advance Studies of Photonics Research (CASPR) to do research in applied optics. Not only did I learn new things from this experience, but the research program made me realized that I want to be a physicist that is willing to work hands on in a lab. I realized that I wanted to work in the field of applied physics and be able learn how to conduct my own experiments in the future. Therefore, after I graduate from UMBC, I plan to do research in applied optics and learn how to force photons to interact with each other or how to measure the non-linear index of refractions of various materials. Optics is very interesting to me because we can do so much with light from fiber cables and television sets to quantum mechanics and