The Sherlock Holmes series was foundational in shaping my goal to work in medical robotics. I’ve always loved to learn and problem-solve, but I only really got into reading in the fifth grade. That year, my school gave us “library cards,” which meant that for the very first time, we had access to the entirety of our library’s collection. My classmates and I would fight over the colorful, glossy-paged Tintin comics, but I prized them for the mystery they held. I liked trying to figure out what would happen before I reached the next page. I have always loved solving things, and those books gave me a place to practice thinking ahead. After transferring schools, I didn’t have access to “Tintin,” but my love for mystery books continued. Then, in seventh grade, my aunt gave me “Twilight” and “A Study in Scarlet” for my birthday. Twilight was nearly 500 pages, so I picked the much thinner Sherlock Holmes book. I did not understand it at first. Two or three months later, I picked it up again, and suddenly everything clicked. I became fascinated by Sherlock’s approach to solving problems. His “mind palace,” his experiments with different substances, and his ability to identify illnesses and clues by observing symptoms made me wonder how much information the human body could reveal if you knew where to look. That curiosity pushed me toward biology. I began reading about the human body and eventually started reading research papers because Sherlock had taught me to be skeptical: I wanted to know not just what someone claimed, but how they knew it was true. I learned things I had never even considered before, from the function of the spleen to CPR and return of spontaneous circulation (ROSC). More recently, I have become especially interested in women’s health and the research behind heart attack symptoms, including how differences between male and female patients can affect what doctors recognize and how treatments interact with hormonal cycles. Professionally, I want to combine that curiosity about the human body with my interest in robotics. As an undergraduate research assistant at Penn State, I am currently working with Pepper, a robot being developed to provide social relief for people with dementia. Ultimately, I hope to work on medical robotics that can assist with surgery and make healthcare more precise. Sherlock Holmes taught me to question, observe, and keep looking for the answer. Reading gave me the curiosity to ask those questions in the first place.

I was thirteen when I watched a K-drama about a daughter who built a device to help her blind mother navigate the world. Afterward, I remember sitting on my floor, sketching my own version: a phone that would name objects and speak distances, running locally so it would still work without internet. I didn't know enough math to finish it, but that afternoon is the reason I'm a computer science major, still trying to finish what I started sketching that day. My vision sharpened when I met farmers in their sixties on a trip to my father's university in Rajasthan. They were men whose shoulders had done the same labor for forty years and could no longer keep up with it. They told me they'd rather keep working in pain than become a burden to anyone. I keep thinking about that — the selflessness, the dedication to giving back to their communities. I hope my engineering can make their duties a little less demanding. Sloane Stephens established her foundation at twenty because she believed in leveling the playing field for underserved young people. I understand that impulse. I grew up in India, watching people around me work harder than anyone I knew and still get less because the field was never level to begin with. The values her grandparents lived by — resilience, kindness, and self-belief — are the same ones I saw in the people who raised me. They didn't have much, but they never let me believe that I couldn't build something that mattered. At Penn State, I'm working on an honors thesis in vision-based human-robot interaction: a system that reads a person's posture in real time and helps a robot respond only where the body can no longer manage safely on its own. Simply a camera watching, working where needed, and staying out of the way everywhere else rather than being an added burden. The people who keep me going aren't famous. In the tenth grade I met Rekha. Rekha had a stroke that left her right hand weak, and her job was supply tracking at an NGO near my father's university. Writing left-handed, bracing the paper with her forearm, took most of her morning. I set up voice typing on her phone so she could speak entries into a spreadsheet instead. The first tries were bad — "supply" came out as "supple," and numbers dropped when she paused. We spent twenty-five minutes getting frustrated at a phone, testing one small fix after another, until it worked. The next morning she finished the day's log before the tea break. She found me by the gate before I left, wrapped her working arm around me, and said, "You gave me my mornings back." That's the change I'm determined to create. Technology that lets people keep doing their own work, their own way, with their own name on it. Sloane Stephens used her platform to uplift her community while competing at the highest level. I want to do the same with the platform my education is giving me — to be an inspiration and source of strength to others, the way her foundation has been for over ten thousand young people. The support this scholarship offers would let me focus more fully on my thesis and research, carrying forward Doc & Glo’s legacy. Thank you for considering my application and for your dedication to students who are determined to turn their passion into something productive. I will carry this honor forward with the same purpose Sloane carries her grandparents' legacy — on purpose, for someone other than myself.

It was 2041, and Aanya was three years into building a system nobody had asked her to build when she got the message from the field team: farmer number forty-one had said yes. Forty of the last forty-one farmers her team had approached in rural Rajasthan had said no, politely, immediately, to a camera-and-arm system that watched a person's body for the one motion that would eventually break it, and did nothing else. She understood the no. She'd been hearing a version of it about her own work for years, in review rooms where she was usually the only one who looked like her. Her thesis advisor had told her the interesting problems in robotics were in perception and control, and that what she wanted to build, a system whose main skill was knowing when not to act, sounded more like psychology than engineering. Nobody said it wasn't real work. They said it wasn't the hard part. Her grandfather still farmed, the way Ramlal did. Her uncles still asked him to stop. Ramlal's field was less than two acres, no tractor, no hired crew: a hoe and land worked the way it had been worked for forty years, because that was still the only way most small Indian farmers could afford to work it. The camera on the pole, the program's fourth generation, didn't move. That was the first thing Ramlal noticed when the field team came through explaining the thing they wanted to bolt above his land. It doesn't move, they said, like that was supposed to reassure him. Nothing wraps around your arm. Nothing beeps. It just watches. He said no for the first two seasons. Not because he doubted it worked; the demonstration in the district office had been convincing, an engineer's slideshow full of joint angles and stress curves. He said no because his sons had tried to get him to move to the city, and every version of help he'd ever been offered came wrapped in the same unspoken sentence: you can't do this anymore. He didn't need a machine to tell him that in a new way. What changed his mind wasn't the engineer. It was Sohan, two fields over, who'd had the system installed the season before and was still, visibly, doing everything himself. Ramlal watched him for a week before asking. Sohan swung the hoe the same way he always had, bent the same way he always had. Watching him work the field, you wouldn't have guessed anything was different at all. The only difference was that once or twice a morning, right at the top of a lift, something in Sohan's shoulder that should have caught, didn't. A half-second hitch, gone before it became a wince. The arm dipped down, took the last few degrees off his shoulder, and folded itself away before Sohan had finished the row. "It doesn't help me plant," Sohan told him. "It just doesn't let my shoulder finish tearing itself apart. That's all. I do the rest." That distinction turned out to be expensive. It cost Aanya two years to earn it. Her first version tried to help more: it flagged fatigue, suggested rest breaks, logged output for the NGO's records. Adoption was zero. One farmer told her, through a translator, that he'd spent his life being told what his body could and couldn't do by landlords, doctors, and now, apparently, a camera. A reviewer at a robotics conference called the redesigned, quieter version "elegant, but not very sophisticated." Around then she read about Joanne Pransky, who'd called herself the world's first robot psychiatrist because Asimov had imagined one before the field existed. Pransky hadn't waited for permission to say the social side of a machine was the real engineering problem. Aanya stopped waiting too. The hardest part of her system was never the joint-angle classifier. It was teaching a machine to do almost nothing, on purpose, at exactly the right moment. Ramlal let them install it that winter. The first weeks, he braced constantly, certain it would eventually take over more than he'd agreed to. It never did. It watched his shoulder the way an alert, silent neighbor might watch a man carrying something too heavy: present, ready, and otherwise not involved, until the weight crossed over from hard into dangerous. Every ordinary ache of forty years, it left alone. It wasn't there to make his life easy. It was there to remove the one motion that would have ended his ability to work at all. Three seasons later, his younger son stood at the edge of the field, watching him work the way Ramlal had once watched Sohan. "You don't need to keep doing this," his son said. Old script, new context. Ramlal didn't stop moving. "I know," he said. "I want to." Aanya read reports like this one from her lab, and the sentence that stopped her every time was never the accuracy number. It was always some version of I want to. She'd stopped thinking of this as one farmer's shoulder a long time ago. The same design decision, help this precise or help this intrusive, decided adoption or rejection across millions of small farms that would never see a tractor. Multiply that by a subcontinent and you're past the question of one field. You're into whether people keep their own hands on their own land. Asimov had written robots bound by laws precise enough to prevent harm, then invented Susan Calvin, a robopsychologist, almost like he already suspected the harder problem would never be mechanical. Calvin's whole job was reading a machine's intentions the way you'd read a person's, closer to what Aanya had spent two years learning than anything from her control-theory coursework. None of that got written into code. It got written into what the camera on the pole chose not to do, one shoulder, one stubborn season at a time, until a woman thousands of miles away had mostly stopped hearing that her work wasn't the hard part.

In 10th grade I watched a Korean drama where a daughter built a device to help her mother, who was slowly losing her eyesight, navigate the world. I don't remember the show's name. I remember sitting on my floor afterward, sketching my own version: a phone that would use its camera to name objects and speak out distances, running locally so it would still work without internet. I didn't know enough math to finish it. That afternoon is the reason I'm a computer science major now, at Penn State, still trying to finish what I started sketching that day. The pull got sharper on a trip to visit my father, who teaches at an agricultural university in Rajasthan, India. I met farmers in their sixties whose bodies had done the same labor for forty years and could no longer keep up with it, and NGO members who told me they hated asking for help. They wanted to do things themselves. Chris was the one who always asked first. I think about how much that must have meant to people who spent their lives refusing to ask anyone, and it's why I care about technology for people who need it, not technology for its own sake. My dream job is building assistive robotics: systems that watch a person's posture or movement through a camera and step in only where the body can no longer manage on its own, without a wearable or a new device to learn. I'm working toward this through a vision-based human-robot interaction project using ROS2 and MediaPipe, and an honors thesis in the same direction. I want a career where the measure of good engineering is whether someone like the farmer I met gets to keep working with dignity, not whether a demo looks impressive. I'm a strong candidate for this scholarship because I understand, firsthand, what Chris Jackson understood: that a CS degree can be hard to afford, and worth fighting for. My family took out a loan for my education, and this year my sister started college too, splitting that same stretched budget, at the exact moment my tuition, as an international student, rose another $5,000. Working more hours doesn't close a gap that size. I work fifteen hours a week in the dining hall to help pay it down, and most weeks the job leaves no real room for the thesis work I came here to do. That's the same discipline I bring to my technical projects, from a neural network built from scratch to a hackathon-winning drug-interaction platform. I'm asking for this scholarship because it would let me spend that time on my thesis instead of another shift, the same way Chris spent his time on the people in front of him instead of holding back. Chris made time to be fully present with people and to ask how he could help. I'd like to spend my career doing the engineering version of that question, for the people policy rooms tend to overlook.

Many NGOs in the villages my father works with give jobs to people with disabilities, work that doesn't ask for two working hands or perfect eyesight, just reliability. One woman at the NGO office, Rekha, had had a stroke that left her right side weak. Her job was supply tracking: checking what had gone out each morning, on paper, name, item, quantity, date. Writing left-handed, cramped over a clipboard, took most of her morning. She braced the paper with her right forearm since that hand couldn't hold it, and wrote slowly with her left. "You could ask someone to write it," I said. "I could," she said. "I don't." "Why not?" She shrugged with the shoulder that still worked. "Then it's not my job. Someone's doing my job for me." I didn't have equipment, just my phone. She already left herself voice notes during the day, so I knew her phone could hear her fine. I asked to try something, and she waved me over like she expected it not to work. I opened Google Sheets and set up columns matching her form: name, item, quantity, date. Then I turned on the phone's built-in voice-typing keyboard and showed her how to speak into each cell instead of writing. The first tries were bad, it caught "supply" as "supple" twice, dropped a number when she paused mid-sentence. I reordered the columns, put quantity first since she said it most clearly, and had her say numbers as full words after "5 kg" kept coming out as "5 km." It took about twenty-five minutes of us getting frustrated at a phone, testing one small fix after another, before it worked. Once it worked, she ran through six entries without stopping, fixing one misheard word herself. She looked up, surprised. "That's it?" "That's it." The next morning, someone told me later, she'd finished the day's log before the tea break, something that used to eat her entire morning. Before we left, she found me by the gate, wrapped her working arm around me, and said, half laughing, "You gave me my mornings back." Then she pulled back and made me watch her do one entry start to finish anyway, like she needed a witness, not just a hug. "I did that," she said, when the last cell filled in. Not asking. Telling me. I hadn't written a line of code that day, but I'd tinkered my way through a real problem the way I always have, testing, breaking, retesting, until a tool that already existed did something it wasn't built to do. It's the same instinct that made me build a neural network from scratch instead of importing one, not because the library wouldn't have worked, but because I wanted to know why it did, the same reason I didn't just hand Rekha the phone and walk away. That's the instinct behind the vision-based robotics research I'm pursuing for my honors thesis too: watching how a person's body moves and stepping in only where it can no longer manage safely on its own, so the dignity of doing the work yourself never has to be what you give up. I want to spend the rest of my education, and a career in assistive robotics, building more of exactly that: small, hacked-together fixes, and eventually larger ones, that let someone keep doing their own work, their own way. I don't know if Rekha is still doing that job. I know the list she filled out that day went out under her name, in her own words, spoken into a phone that finally listened right.

I flew from Delhi to New York alone, with a student visa and not much else figured out. I didn't know how to get from JFK to State College, so I asked strangers at the airport how to reach Port Authority and the hotel I booked for the night. My Indian card wouldn't process the on-site payment the hotel required, and they wouldn't take cash. I stood at the front desk explaining this until the manager, for no reason he owed me, let it go. The next morning I bought a bus ticket at Port Authority and stood at the gate surrounded by other Indian students, all with parents beside them, checking bags and taking photos. I didn't have that. I had a suitcase and a folder of paperwork. When I reached campus, my dorm room wouldn't open, and I stood outside it for an hour until a resident assistant found me and helped me sort it out. That was the first day. Reading about Maggie moving to the U.S. with no support system in place, I recognized that day immediately. Not the idea of it. The specific, logistical loneliness of it. Since then, I've had panic attacks roughly once a month, almost always alone, in a dorm room or a bathroom between classes. Part of it is that no one is there to talk you down. Part of it is not wanting to be the kind of person who makes her friends carry her, so you get through it yourself and still show up for a 6 a.m. shift the same day. I don't say this for effect. It's just the truest version I have of what it takes to keep moving. What I relate to more than the fear itself is Maggie's determination to become genuinely expert at what she chose, not just competent at it. My family took out a large loan in India for my education, and I work fifteen hours a week in my campus dining hall to help carry it. As an international student I'm not eligible for federal aid, so this scholarship isn't a bonus, it's what keeps the math working. But the discipline isn't only about the debt. When I wanted to understand how neural networks function, I built one from scratch in NumPy rather than trusting a library, writing the backpropagation by hand until I understood it from the inside instead of taking it on faith. That same instinct drives my honors thesis now: a vision-based system that reads a person's posture in real time and helps a robot respond to it. I'm building it for people like the farmers I met on a trip to my father's university in India, men in their sixties whose shoulders can no longer do the lifting their fields require, who told me they'd rather keep working in pain than become a burden to anyone. I want to build something precise enough to reach someone like that, not just impressive enough to win a demo. Maggie spent her career making engineering that had to work for real people. That's the standard I'm holding myself to. I don't know if I'll ever climb a mountain. But I know what it is to land in a new country with no one waiting for me, to sit outside a locked door until a stranger helps me open it, and to decide none of that gets to be the reason I stop. If I'm given this scholarship, I intend to carry Maggie's name the way she carried her own path: forward, on purpose, for someone other than myself.