What did you inherit from your parents? We immediately answer this question with the "obvious" traits, such as eye color, height, or hair texture, but how often do we consider how we cope and communicate? We tend to overlook the behaviors we pick up from our environment. Mental health struggles have been present in my family for as long as I can remember, even if they were never named. My father lived with epilepsy from childhood, a condition that shaped much of his life. His seizures were visible and therefore taken seriously, but the anxiety, frustration, and isolation that followed were not. In many South Asian households, mental health is rarely acknowledged, and suffering is often expected to be endured quietly. Although my father is now physically healed after brain surgery and no longer experiences seizures, no one ever addressed the emotional toll those years took on him. His bottled anger, constant worry, and academic and career limitations became part of daily life due to his disability, and children learn from what they see. I grew up believing that emotions were something to suppress, not explore. As a result, I carried my own anxiety silently, feeling isolated and unable to relate to friends who seemed unaffected. In the second half of high school, I found myself spending many lunch periods in the Haven, a mental health resource provided by my school. There, I regularly met with a psychiatrist named Hui, who became one of the first people I felt truly understood me. She recognized the stigma surrounding mental health in Asian immigrant families and created a space where I did not have to explain or justify how I felt. She helped me recognize patterns of anxiety that I had been taught to ignore while juggling demanding classes, extracurriculars, and challenges at home. Instead of being dismissed or misunderstood, I was listened to and validated. With her support, I became aware of how stress affected my daily habits—how lack of sleep, poor eating, and constant pressure fed into one another. Over time, I learned how to interrupt that cycle. While progress has never been linear, I am now far better equipped to recognize when I am struggling and how to respond with care. Because of these experiences, I am deeply aware of how isolating it can feel when mental health struggles are misunderstood or minimized by those closest to you. Even now, stigma remains widespread, and the self-sabotaging behaviors people develop are often treated as inconveniences rather than signals of distress. I am currently studying mechanical engineering at Columbia University, with interests in robotics and quantum research, which are fields with growing applications in biomedical and neurological technologies. Developing tools that help people, such as supporting both physical and mental therapy, matters to me, especially because I have seen how closely the two are connected. My father’s experiences taught me that physical and mental health do not exist in isolation; they compound one another. At Columbia, I have sought out communities such as Columbia Formula Racing not only to challenge myself in my career field, but also to help build environments where people uplift one another, particularly those whose struggles, like my own or Elizabeth Schalk’s, are not always visible. In the high-pressure academic environment, where many of my peers carry anxiety quietly, I try to be the person I needed: someone who listens, checks in, and reminds others that taking care of themselves is not a weakness. This scholarship would help me fulfill my financial responsibilities without having to compromise unpaid research opportunities or time spent supporting those around me.

Selected Paragraph (Plato, Republic Book VII, 514a-515c, translated by Benjamin Jowett): "Behold! human beings living in an underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; they have been here from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners, there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which puppet players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets." The world of ideas is rarely stumbled upon. It must be fought for, uncovered through friction, and often wrested from the structures that aim to obscure it. This is the sharper edge of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave—a text too often reduced to a feel-good metaphor for intellectual growth. While the common interpretation celebrates the human capacity to awaken from ignorance, the passage’s opening paragraph describes not a passive confusion but a carefully designed environment of constraint. With its architecture of chains, firelight, barriers, and orchestrated shadows, the cave is not merely a place of darkness. It is a system constructed to prevent people from recognizing that any other kind of light exists. Plato begins the allegory not with philosophical abstraction, but with a detailed physical image: people immobilized since childhood, forced to face forward, their heads fixed in place. These are not figures who have wandered into illusion—they were born into it. That distinction matters. The fact that the prisoners can only see what’s in front of them isn’t poetic embellishment. It is the condition of minds raised in isolation from the very possibility of alternative perspectives. What appears to be a limitation of knowledge is, in fact, a limitation of imagination. Their conceptual boundaries were shaped before they could choose for themselves, and over time, those constraints became indistinguishable from reality. The fire, placed “above and behind,” plays a crucial symbolic role in this apparatus. Fire produces light, but it does not enlighten. Its function is to cast just enough illumination to generate shadows—images that appear real only because they are all the prisoners have ever seen. Crucially, this fire is not sunlight. Plato specifically chooses a man-made flame, an artificial source of visibility controlled by those hidden from view. Its purpose is not to reveal but to conceal, by offering a convincing imitation of truth. In this way, the fire becomes a metaphor for the institutions or ideologies that control perception while disguising their influence as neutral or natural. What’s offered to the prisoners is a filtered reality with intent behind it, though it may appear as a simple mistake at first glance. This deliberate placement of the fire is a reminder that control of perception begins with control of what counts as light. Beyond the fire lies the raised path and the wall, which transform the cave from a place of ignorance to a site of performance. Plato introduces the puppet show explicitly, likening the setup to a theatrical stage where figures behind the wall manipulate objects to cast shadows. This decorated analogy reveals a calculated spectacle. The prisoners are not passively ignorant. They are the audience of a long-running production. The shadows they believe in are not mere distortions; they are curated, rehearsed, and displayed with purpose. This detail shifts the focus of the allegory away from individual misunderstanding and toward systemic manipulation. What the prisoners accept as reality has been staged from the beginning, not simply to obscure the truth, but to maintain control over belief. The structure of the cave is equally social. The prisoners sit together, side by side, watching the same images, affirming the same illusions. There is comfort in the collective, and over time, repetition becomes reinforcement. The cave is a physical setting as well as a culture—one that does not require violence to maintain power, because it fosters mutual agreement among those who are trapped. Plato anticipates the way shared beliefs can be shaped not through force, but through early exposure and group consensus. When a society teaches its members to question little and conform often, the system defends itself through routine and familiarity rather than force. This reading reframes the cave from a metaphor about internal confusion to one about external design—an ideological structure that maintains itself by conditioning its members to find security in sameness. This deeper reading of the allegory also alters the role of the philosopher. In popular interpretations, the philosopher is a solitary figure who escapes the cave and achieves wisdom. But in this version, their journey is not a personal triumph. It is a confrontation with a structure meant to suppress awakening. Escaping the cave requires not only awareness but disobedience. To see beyond the shadows is to violate the cave’s intended function, and Plato acknowledges the cost of this resistance. When the freed prisoner returns to the cave to share what they’ve seen, they are mocked, even attacked. This reaction is not incidental. It reflects a truth about power: systems built on illusion do not reward those who expose it. The philosopher’s insight, initially intellectual, now grows increasingly political. It threatens the coherence of the world as the prisoners know it. Even Plato’s word choices reinforce the nature of this captivity. The prisoners are described as “chained,” “prevented,” and “habituated”; these are all verbs that emphasize imposed constraint rather than voluntary ignorance. This overlooked diction matters because it suggests that the prisoners' condition is the product of systems acting on them, not a result of their own lack of effort. Plato offers a warning here: when limits are embedded early and thoroughly enough, they no longer feel like limits. They feel like truth. This understanding reshapes the purpose of education in Plato’s thought. If perception is molded by one’s environment, then real education must disrupt that environment. It is not simply a matter of acquiring facts or reading canonical texts. It is an act of re-seeing, an ongoing process of making the familiar strange again. Close reading, in this sense, becomes more than an academic tool. It is a habit of skepticism, a method for identifying the angles, filters, and patterns that guide what we assume to be obvious. By paying attention to the details—the fire’s placement, the prisoners’ positioning, the stage-like nature of the wall—we begin to grasp the mechanisms behind the illusion. Each element is a clue, and following them reveals not only the shape of the cave, but the forces that constructed it. These insights extend far beyond ancient philosophy. In a world where digital platforms manage attention and media ecosystems blur entertainment and information, the cave has become more sophisticated, not less. Many of today’s beliefs are not chosen, but absorbed: shaped by algorithms, reinforced by repetition, and delivered through channels that seem objective. What Plato described with chains and shadows now takes the form of curated content and data-driven persuasion. The danger isn’t that people know too little, but that they feel certain while navigating illusions they were trained never to question. What gives Plato’s allegory its lasting power is its precision. It does not merely warn about ignorance. It maps how belief can be constructed, sustained, and defended. The cave is not a failure of thought, but the success of a system designed to define reality in advance. Resisting that system is difficult and often painful, but necessary, because real growth begins not in disruption, but in certainty. Turning one's head requires effort, courage, and a willingness to see discomfort as a necessary companion to truth. Close reading, in this context, becomes the first movement toward intellectual freedom; it is a refusal to accept the surface as all there is, and a commitment to searching for the forces behind the image.

Not many people actively choose to wear clothes that don’t even fit them. But that was my version of back-to-school shopping: standing in my cousin’s closet while my parents sifted through fraying jeans and oversized sweaters, saying things like, “You’ll grow into it.” At first, I didn’t question it. Hand-me-downs were normal to me—familiar, soft, already broken in. But as I got older, the differences between my classmates’ brand-name wardrobes and my stitched-up sleeves started to feel like they meant something. I felt like I had less. Like I was less. Back then, I thought our resourcefulness came from lack. I saw it as something to outgrow. I didn’t yet understand that my family wasn’t just trying to save money—we were living out a quiet philosophy. We reused everything: yogurt containers became lentil jars, torn pillowcases became rags. Nothing was thrown away until it truly had no use left. My parents, Bangladeshi immigrants who spent their young adulthood packed into tight apartments with too many people and too little space, didn’t call it "sustainability". But looking back, that’s exactly what it was. I spent much of my childhood trying to run from that lifestyle—pretending I didn’t know my mom when she picked up a discarded mahogany chair from the curb, avoiding bringing friends home, hiding the discomfort I felt about not being able to participate in the same kind of consumer culture that others could. I distracted myself with clubs and volunteer roles, anything that kept me away from reminders of what we didn’t have. Then the pandemic hit. Locked indoors, surrounded by the very things I once wanted to escape, I began spending more time watching documentaries, reading about climate change, labor exploitation, and the environmental toll of fast fashion—much of it impacting my own Bengali community overseas. It struck me that the lifestyle I had once been ashamed of was actually one I should have admired. My family’s refusal to waste wasn’t just practical—it was purposeful. That realization changed the way I saw everything. I began looking for ways to bring that mindset into the community. I helped run donation and reuse drives at our public library, collecting and redistributing school supplies and gently used books. I organized projects that upcycled discarded materials, turning old plastic jugs into traps for the invasive spotted lanternfly species in our area. To me, being a purposeful community member means staying grounded in values that benefit others, not just yourself. It means seeing where you can contribute, even in quiet or unconventional ways. Being responsible means refusing to look away when you know you can help. And being productive isn’t about doing the most; it’s about doing what matters, with intention and integrity. Now that I’m in college, I carry these values with me into engineering. On Columbia’s Formula Racing team, I’m working on redesigning vehicle parts for better fuel efficiency and lower emissions—creating solutions with sustainability at their core. I’ve continued to volunteer, helping coordinate science fairs for local students and promoting hands-on learning that doesn’t require expensive equipment. I’m still learning, still growing, and still thinking about how every design, every decision, can ripple outward. I didn’t choose my upbringing, but I choose how I honor it. And I’ve realized that I am worth the dreams I chase, because they’re built from everything my community taught me, everything I’ve repaired, reused, and reimagined. My goal isn’t just to succeed for myself—it’s to make sure I leave behind something others can grow into, too.