grad school app essay i wrote for a friend

Grad school admissions essay for M Maricar:

“Maricar means vessel. That was what my father once told me. The tribe that travelled from the Arabian Peninsula, and now most of them reside in Tamil Nadu, India. They were explorers.”

     In 1955 my father first left his hometown in Tamil Nadu on a boat to Singapore. He was fifteen years old. He slept along the five-foot-way, taught himself to read, and got himself educated. After his elders lost ownership of lands rich in coal, he came to know the importance of education. He worked hard, discovering his talent as an educator, eventually founding several private schools in Singapore, where he worked to provide affordable tuition and make education accessible to people of all backgrounds.
     Much like my father, I am driven to follow the road to knowledge, no matter how rocky the road. Perhaps more importantly, I am interested in paving new roads: it is not necessary that the road to knowledge be harder to travel for everyone.
     Yet my experience studying physics has taught me that education often does not function in this way. In the physics community, as I see it, bonds have formed along lines of gender, class and race, allowing some particles more freedom, higher potentials than others.
     I have experience breaking these kinds of bonds. Growing up in Singapore, a place highly segregated across the three major ethnicities, I struggled to find a sense of belonging. But I came to realize that my identity as Chindian—both Chinese and Indian—as an advantage, developing a knack for communicating with people of all races and gaining a unique perspective on the mechanics of social interaction.
     Such insights naturally found their way into my work as a researcher in the lab of Professor Laszlo Barabasi, studying temporal dependency of human proximity networks. Our work enabled me to acquire the skills necessary to articulate my life and educational experiences in a form that others can relate to, both visually and analytically. Through the application of network topology, we scrutinized physical time-space records of people interacting face-to-face: how clustered interactions correlate with future events.
     As I continued my work in physics under the supervision of Professor Adrian Feiguin, and my passion for it deepened I began to understand its significance to me. Always—I couldn’t help it—in the mathematical representation of physical phenomena, I worked to uncover the similarities between our world and the electron’s atomic scale. In effort to study the quantum correlation of spins interacting, I developed a Monte Carlo algorithm to determine magnetization as a function of temperature. Just as magnetic moments align when they subjected to minimal temperature, students in lecture or citizens of a state work can together in directed manner. My work is to determine the breaking point—the shift in temperature that causes the spins to point in a new direction.
      Physics, I’ve found, is incredibly human: happy, sad, even sexy. With friends, I like to play a game: tell them to open my physics book to any page, and then I will tell them a story. A story that often comes in handy: when your girlfriend dumps, you the math works out. Sometimes you have to break things apart to build even stronger bonds. And the Eureka moment that we are perpetually seeking is just like love at first sight.
     Physicists like to talk about frustrated particles, to make physics sound like real life. The problem, I’ve discovered, is that they have yet to learn how to make real life like physics. Thus, my goal is to ensure scientists are doing their math correctly when they walk away from the chalkboard. When they look at a woman or a person of color, they do not think of her as confined to a smaller potential well.