Cancer entered my life in a very quiet, ordinary way—through hospital waiting rooms that seemed to stretch longer than they should. As my mother went through treatment, I sat beside my family while doctors spoke in careful, technical language about scans, medications, and next steps. I didn’t always understand the science at the time, but I understood the feeling: waiting, hoping, and trying to stay steady when nothing felt certain. Those experiences sparked my interest in how treatments are developed. Long-term, I hope to become a chemical engineer working in pharmaceutical research and development, contributing to the creation of treatments that give patients and their families more time, more hope, and fewer moments of uncertainty. I am drawn to engineering because it offers a way to take abstract scientific ideas and turn them into something real—something that can actually change what a family experiences in a hospital room. The values that drive me are curiosity, perseverance, empathy, and responsibility. I aim to approach difficult problems with patience and persistence, while remembering that behind every dataset or reaction is someone waiting for a breakthrough. My experiences in research and engineering have shown me that progress is rarely linear; it comes from trial and error, rethinking assumptions, and continuing even when results are slow. Ultimately, I don’t just want a career in engineering: I want one connected to people. I want to build things that matter and, in some small way, make difficult moments a little easier for others.

When I was younger, I was obsessed with 11:11. Whenever I happened to look at the clock at exactly 11:11, I took it as a sign that things would be okay and that my wishes would come true. I did the same with other coincidences: a coin landing heads three times in a row, seeing the same number repeatedly, anything that made the future feel a little more predictable. I think I needed that predictability. I had recently arrived in the U.S.—new country, new language, new everything—when my mother was diagnosed with cancer. There was so much I could not understand or control that I started looking for patterns wherever I could find them. I took any and every coincidence as divine providence, as fate whispering the future to me. If everything was already written, then I could let go of the weight of choice and action, and simply accept what was meant to be. For a while, that became my way of coping. Science offered me another way. I first began to understand that difference while conducting research on cancer-related genes in fruit flies in my biology class. I went into the experiment with a hypothesis about how increased sugar intake would affect the flies, but the results did not simply confirm what I expected: there was no significant difference. I had to ask why the results turned out the way they did. Although my hypothesis was not supported, the null results were not the end of the path. I could adjust the conditions, collect more data, and test a new hypothesis, building on what I had learned from the first experiment. For the first time, uncertainty did not feel like something happening to me. It was something I could interact with. That realization is a large part of why I am drawn to chemical engineering. I love that it sits between understanding how things work and figuring out how to make that understanding useful. I am especially interested in pharmaceutical research and development, where chemistry, biology, and engineering can come together to turn scientific discoveries into treatments that actually reach people. My interest is not just in discovering something new, but in understanding how to make it reliable, scalable, and accessible. I often think about those hospital waiting rooms when I consider what I want to do with that knowledge. As a child, I could not understand the medical terminology or do anything to change what was happening to my mother. I could only watch and wait, making wishes every time 11:11 rolled around. Now, I want to work on the other side of that uncertainty—not by promising that every outcome can be controlled, but by helping expand what new medicine can make possible. I used to look for certainty in coincidences. Science taught me to pursue it through evidence. I want to carry that lesson into pharmaceutical research: asking better questions, challenging what we think we know, and ultimately helping create answers that give other families something more meaningful than a sign that everything will be okay.

For most of my life, I believed in a kind of “before and after.” There was the version of me working toward something—grades, leadership positions, college acceptances—and then, eventually, there would be a version of me who had made it. Everything I did felt like it belonged to the “before,” a necessary but temporary state on the way to something more meaningful. Watching Pixar's Soul challenged that idea. The film follows Joe Gardner, a middle school band teacher who finally gets the opportunity he believes will define his life: performing as a professional jazz musician with Dorothea Williams. But after an unexpected accident, he finds himself separated from his body, forced to confront what it actually means to live. What struck me most was not the plot itself, but the quiet realization at its center: that Joe had mistaken his “spark” for a singular purpose, when in reality, life was never meant to hinge on one defining achievement. That realization felt uncomfortably familiar. As someone who has spent years chasing academic and extracurricular goals, I’ve often measured my life in milestones—test scores, competition wins, leadership roles. In that mindset, the present becomes transactional. Every late night, every weekend spent working, every commitment is justified not because it matters on its own, but because it contributes to an eventual outcome. Soul challenged that way of thinking. There is a moment in the film when Joe finally achieves the dream he has spent his entire life working toward. And then—nothing changes. The world does not transform. He is still himself. It’s a quiet, almost disappointing realization, but an important one: purpose is not something deferred until a single moment of arrival. It is something that exists in the accumulation of ordinary experiences. Since watching the film, I have started to notice those moments differently. Not as checkpoints, but as something closer to the point itself. Things I once treated as purely instrumental—studying late into the night, science competitions, long weekend orchestra rehearsals—used to feel like pieces of a larger equation, valuable only for what they would eventually produce. Now, they feel less like sacrifices and more like experiences in their own right. I find myself paying attention in a way I didn’t before: to the quiet satisfaction of finally understanding a concept, to the small moments of laughter with teammates during competitions, to the gradual way all the instrument parts finally meld together during rehearsals. Even my commute has changed. I used to spend it working—laptop open, trying to make every minute productive. Now, I let it be a space where nothing is being optimized or achieved. I watch the streets pass, notice things I would have ignored, and allow myself to exist in the in-between instead of constantly chasing the destination. This shift hasn’t made me any less ambitious. I still care deeply about my goals, about pursuing engineering, about contributing to meaningful problems. But I no longer see my life as something that will only begin once I reach them. And that, I think, is the difference between having a goal be your life and having a life with a goal.