The summer after fourth grade is a time in my life I keep coming back to. I was invited to attend a summer camp at Kennedy Space Center with a small group of kids. Going in, I wasn’t that excited, but immediately I was blown away with all that Space Coast had to offer. Suddenly all the history I’d learned about space exploration wasn’t tucked away in some textbook across school, it was right in my face. For a couple days I was a little astronaut, braving through mock rocket launches, touching real moon rocks, and drinking Tang all day long. Yet my favorite part might have been watching a rocket launch live, which I’ll never forget. I had an absolute blast at Kennedy Space Center, but more critically, it charted my course toward aerospace engineering. The experience was just as fun as it was inspiring. It showed me how much of an impact engineers can have, that little geeks like me really can put people on the moon. I want to go back, not as a mesmerized child, but as an engineer ready to contribute to that rich history of space exploration. I hope that one day, I’ll watch my own rocket lift off just as I saw others so many years ago. I’d like to breathe new life into the largely stagnant space industry. Space exploration is an industry with clear direction that is only struggling to get over some initial economic hurdles. It’s my goal to help the world make space profitable, which will surely lead to enormous technological and economic benefits. One area I’m particularly interested in developing is asteroid mining, which could shower the world in an unfathomable amount of metals used in electronics, namely platinum. Rather annoyingly, asteroid mining is feasible with current technology but is too expensive to replace terrestrial mining. It is my career goal to engineer technological breakthroughs to make asteroid mining affordable, sparking a new electronic golden age. Yet I maintain interest in other areas, particularly fluid mechanics and how it is applied to aircraft. I’d also like to publish research in the area as an academic, advancing the research I’ve already done in fluid mechanics. To do this, I’ll need to pursue a higher education in aerospace engineering. I’ll use both my time in college and job experience to learn not just the math and physics engineers use, but also the thought process they use. I have a number of academic goals I’d like to satisfy while I’m still a student. Conducting research is something I’d like to continue doing as an undergraduate. I’d like to join competitive engineering teams to hone my skills. In addition, I want to help fund my college degree with a work-study program, where I hope to soak up valuable employment skills. However, I won’t lose sight of having a bit of fun in college as well, joining social and non-academic organizations. Such a degree will not come cheap, and growing up in a poor Libyan family, I will need to find ways to fund my college degree so I can one day fulfill my childhood dreams. This scholarship will help me be the best engineer I can be.

The summer after fourth grade is a time in my life I keep coming back to. I was invited to attend a summer camp at Kennedy Space Center with a small group of kids. Going in, I wasn’t that excited, but immediately I was blown away with all that Space Coast had to offer. Suddenly all the history I’d learned about space exploration wasn’t tucked away in some textbook across school, it was right in my face. For a couple days I was a little astronaut, braving through mock rocket launches, touching real moon rocks, and drinking Tang all day long. Yet my favorite part might have been watching a rocket launch live, which I’ll never forget. I had an absolute blast at Kennedy Space Center, but more critically, it charted my course toward aerospace engineering. The experience was just as fun as it was inspiring. It showed me how much of an impact engineers can have, that little geeks like me really can put people on the moon. I want to go back, not as a mesmerized child, but as an engineer ready to contribute to that rich history of space exploration. I hope that one day, I’ll watch my own rocket lift off just as I saw others so many years ago. I’d like to breathe new life into the largely stagnant space industry. Space exploration is an industry with clear direction that is only struggling to get over some initial economic hurdles. It’s my goal to help the world make space profitable, which will surely lead to enormous technological and economic benefits. One area I’m particularly interested in developing is asteroid mining, which could shower the world in an unfathomable amount of metals used in electronics, namely platinum. Rather annoyingly, asteroid mining is feasible with current technology but is too expensive to replace terrestrial mining. It is my career goal to engineer technological breakthroughs to make asteroid mining affordable, sparking a new electronic golden age. Yet I maintain interest in other areas, particularly fluid mechanics and how it is applied to aircraft. I’d also like to publish research in the area as an academic, advancing the research I’ve already done in fluid mechanics. To do this, I’ll need to pursue a higher education in aerospace engineering. I’ll use both my time in college and job experience to learn not just the math and physics engineers use, but also the thought process they use. I know nothing about it will be easy: from the work I will have to do to the adjustment it will be moving far away from home to even cooking for myself, my college experience will test me in so many ways. I’m prepared to overcome all of those obstacles in my pursuit of my degree, even cooking for myself, something I am famously inept at doing. I have a number of academic goals I’d like to satisfy while I’m still a student. Research is something I’d like to continue as an undergraduate. I’d like to join competitive engineering teams to hone my skills. In addition, I want to help fund my college degree with a work-study program, where I hope to soak up valuable employment skills. However, I won’t lose sight of having a bit of fun in college as well, joining social and non-academic organizations. Such a degree will not come cheap, and growing up in a poor Libyan family, I will need to find ways to fund my college degree so I can one day fulfill my childhood dreams. This scholarship will help me be the best engineer I can be.

The summer after fourth grade is a time in my life I keep coming back to. I was invited to attend a summer camp at Kennedy Space Center with a small group of kids. Going in, I wasn’t that excited, but immediately I was blown away with all that Space Coast had to offer. Suddenly all the history I’d learned about space exploration wasn’t tucked away in some textbook across school, it was right in my face. For a couple days I was a little astronaut, braving through mock rocket launches, touching real moon rocks, and drinking Tang all day long. Yet my favorite part might have been watching a rocket launch live, which I’ll never forget. I had an absolute blast at Kennedy Space Center, but more critically, it charted my course toward aerospace engineering. The experience was just as fun as it was inspiring. It showed me how much of an impact engineers can have, that little geeks like me really can put people on the moon. I wanted to go back, not as a mesmerized child, but as an engineer ready to contribute to that rich history of space exploration. I hoped that one day, I’ll watch my own rocket lift off just as I saw others so many years ago. Most importantly, I found Tang, my favorite beverage as a kid, which utterly escapes my understanding years later because it tastes nasty now. High school gave me pimples, a better sense of fashion, and new ways to view the universe built upon the old fascinations I had as a child. In my quest to understand the world around me I gravitated to what seemed to underlie it all: numbers, math, physics and its applications. Numbers seemed to me these marvelously regular objects. Calculus and physics took hold of me because every problem was like a window into the fabric of the universe itself. Everything that exists, existed, or ever could exist, in some way, shape, or form, boils down to just straight math, whether it be physics, music, or Mrs. Owen’s essays I had to write in AP Lang. There’s no way I could turn my back on such power. Trading fascination with those rockets I once saw for captivation with how they work, I never looked back from the path of engineering. One characteristic that’s stuck with me for years is that I like thinking about life’s biggest questions. The philosophical implications of my reverent perspective of numbers has not gone unnoticed by me. The summer before senior year gave me another way to understand this universe, one not observed, but one conceived through the lens of philosophy. The power of numbers to predict everything in my mind necessarily implies a deterministic view of the universe. That didn’t sit right with me at first, but it’s a point that I’ve become more than eager to debate with anybody who’s willing to sit and listen to me blabber. Making connections between STEM and philosophy, I spent that summer going down a rabbit hole of philosophical ideas, from determinism through stoicism and terminating at the hazardous straits of pessimism and nihilism as described by Nietzsche (although I will be the first to remind you that Nietzsche was not a nihilist - read Thus Spoke Zarathustra). I think that the ideas of Nietzsche, Zapffe, and other philosophers are useful and have connections beyond the abstract. Science, the pursuit of truth, seems to lead me down odd streets like this, but in my investigation of the universe I’ve appreciated every dead end and side street it’s driven me down. I’ve taken a liking to exploring on my own in philosophy, both by reading the works of great thinkers before me and outlining my thoughts in fits of creative writing. Writing makes me feel intellectually liberated because it’s almost like a universe that I’m creating myself That same summer, I made important discoveries in another way closer to my home in STEM: through fluid mechanics research in Pioneer Academics. In this summer program, I learned about the inner workings of fluid mechanics from Duke professor Dr. Kabala, created an original research topic, and wrote a full research paper at an undergraduate level. It was exactly the engineering opportunity that I was looking for to soothe my captivation of how rockets work, but it certainly wasn’t easy. I stayed up late reading my professor’s textbook to understand the Navier-Stokes equations. I scoured the Internet and my brain about my research topic, the aerodynamics of the novel tilt-rotor aircraft in transition, and devoted hours to synthesizing the perfect paper all while incorporating the feedback of my professor and my peers. Running my trusty NACA0012 airfoil through transient flow to gather the lift and drag coefficients definitely gave me a hard time. I had to run tons and tons of simulations in ANSYS Fluent, but I persevered, and I was delighted to hear Dr. Kabala awarded me the highest possible grade. My paper is currently nominated to the Pioneer Research Journal, the program’s highly competitive journal. It’s curious to know that in working to better understand something, specifically the math and physics behind complex fluid interactions, I contributed something completely unique and useful to the engineering academia. While performing that research, what became increasingly clear to me was how many useful technologies and ideas hinge on our developing understanding of the universe. Tilt-rotor aircraft, the star of my research, may very well be the future of aviation if more researchers can come along, perfect the design, and figure out all the unknowns. Despite our best efforts, turbulent flow continues to be a difficult issue to approach, resulting in dangerous and problematic designs like the V-22 Osprey. The solution to the Navier-Stokes equations is so important to our understanding of anything regarding fluid mechanics that there’s a $1 million prize for uncovering it, but it’s eluded mathematicians for decades. The study of the smallest things, quantum mechanics, seems to have bearing on the largest questions in our universe. The field that I intend to enter as an aerospace engineer is filled with unknowns and difficulties that could propel us to the stars if tackled, like how to make asteroid mining economical or how to conduct interstellar travel in a reasonable amount of time. Understanding all of these great questions about our universe will pay for humanity with new ideas, technologies, and advancement as a species. Moving onto college I want to be a part of that pursuit to understand the universe. While the perspective and difficulties of numbers is undoubtedly my favorite and certainly one that will lead my contribution to the quest, I want to draw from many fields to have a more complete understanding. I enjoy philosophical thinking and I appreciate the connections I’ve made between philosophy and science, spurring numerous thoughtful debates with my friends and family. Mathematics and physics still fascinate me, and walking in the footsteps of Newton I know I have gargantuan shoes to fill. More recently, coding has emerged as a tool for me to invent new products, such as a plastic bottle recycling machine which I used to clean up my local community. I’m always open to new fields that interest me as well, questioning away and making connections. As I continue to acquire more knowledge from all these fields, I’ll better understand how the world works and be able to give back to the world through projects like the recycling project. Others joining on this trek may make their own contributions, like vanquishing the Navier-Stokes equations once and for all or coming up with a new cheap and efficient aircraft design. Following college, I’ll unite everything that I’ve learned to push the space industry higher and higher. The Space Race gave us so many technologies and products, like headphones, smoke detectors, and of course Tang, which after being so heavily associated with NASA, tastes most strongly of discovery. I want to be similarly illuminating in my quest for understanding; breathing new life into a struggling industry to kickstart a new golden age of discovery and advancement. On the global scale, an understanding combining the perspectives of people everywhere will ultimately benefit people everywhere more than just through headphones and smoke detectors. In my relentless questioning and exploration I know I stand on the shoulders of giants, like Newton, Reimann, Nietzsche, and all the others before me. We should all take part in this quest, because though we may never succeed in understanding everything, we’ll still help ourselves in the process.

When you’re at the bottom rung of the ladder, it’s hard to see the light shining off in the distance. All of the little things in the foreground keep getting in the way. Sometimes, you forget the light was ever there at all. You live only for what’s here and now, never basking in the distant glow. There is no better way I could describe the struggle of being poor in this country. As a young man living in the bad part of town, I was born at the bottom of the ladder. My father had to support four children on his single, meager income. I remember always going to bed hungry and hiding the holes in my shoes from my classmates out of embarrassment. But I had always been at the bottom; ignorant of the light, so I thought this was perfectly normal. This is how everybody lives, I thought. I didn’t know there was a future out there in some faraway land. That’s a reason why I didn’t truly internalize the gravity of the situation when one day I came home to an eviction notice on the front door. My parents stared endlessly into the walls with pure shame; they hadn’t paid the rent in months. It was game over. Yet none of that ever even crossed my mind, because every day I was more concerned with just trying to get by. It’s exceedingly difficult to plan for the future, whether it be for college, employment, or simply paying the rent when you don’t know if you are going to eat tomorrow. It’s easy to live life one day at a time, languishing away in the darkness and never having the vision of the big picture beyond everyday barriers. It’s even easier to give in to a life of crime as some of those around me did, forever sacrificing their future for the here and now. What’s hard is to seek out the light, to climb the ladder and see above all those obstacles that lie in the way. It takes a true visionary to live for a better tomorrow; someone who can make something out of nothing, who can avoid succumbing to the eager temptations of the present, and one day, outstretch their hands and pull others up with them. The keys to this are education and community. Both of these factors have lifted me higher than ever before and enabled me to overcome the obstacles of poverty. Education is the ultimate door opener. To seek out the light, one must first know that it’s out there somewhere. Concentrating on and fostering a love for school taught me where my future might lie, and precisely how to strive for it. My love of math and science has compelled me to study aerospace engineering in college. Education gave me the map, but behind me sat a strong community that cheered me on every step of the way and never let me turn back. I owe my success today to an unbreakable network of family, friends, and teachers that have supported me even in my darkest days. I look back at the youth who struggle in the darkness of poverty as I once did. They look for direction and support. I've dedicated my volunteering to this purpose, pulling children, especially of poorer backgrounds, up into the light, whatever it may mean for them. I help them with their education but also provide a listening ear and a community, things I was lucky enough to have growing up. And hopefully, one day, they too will pull others into the light.

There is nothing more inherently human than the community. Humans are social creatures; we search relentlessly for acceptance, for a space to discharge our emotions into the world, and for people that think like us because we cannot survive alone. When we cannot find that community, we dive deep into ourselves, coming out with only the worst we have to offer. Peering inward with shame, we lose ourselves. That is precisely what happened to me in school. A son of poor Libyans going to a rich American school, I had little more than the Muslim faith and the clothes I wore. Everywhere I went, I fell into the shadows of those that were different from me: high-end clothing, sports cars, and the Christian faith dominating it all. While they flexed their new Jordan shoes, I tried my best to hide the holes in my shoes from them. I wasn’t a Christian like everybody else, so I did not know Christian traditions or practices. A core memory of mine is being publicly ridiculed for not knowing what Good Friday was. I felt like an alien in my own school, but the others saw me as not only different but threatening. All they knew about “people like me” they heard from the news: terrorism, bombings, war, and 9/11. It did not take long for my character to become associated with those horrors. Surely my backpack was rigged to explode whenever I asked to use the bathroom, they joked. With no community to fall back on, I saw my own soul be turned against me. All that was left was crushing shame, for my family, my background, and my beliefs. Being Muslim was a curse, I reasoned, and for a long time, I lied about my true faith. I turned away from all of it, and I desperately needed a community just to stay afloat. I found a home in Muslim culture. Gatherings, camps, and prayers were a retreat from the discrimination I faced in school. There I finally met people who were like me; people with similar backgrounds and characteristics and interests. For the first time, I could be who I really was, without the lies, and not be seen as a threat or somehow lesser. I loved all the culture that was around me, the smell of couscous and bazin emanating from the kitchen, the intense soccer matches out on the field, and everybody singing and dancing to traditional songs. Out there was something so much more real about myself than I had felt before. It was at one such gathering that the seed of my career aspirations in aerospace engineering was planted. An older, accomplished man heard of my love for math and science and introduced me to his work at an aerospace company. Others there encouraged me to pursue the career as well. It seems the soil was just right because I was obsessed. The passion was always within me, but that man had just cracked open the shell. As I grew both physically and mentally, that initial fervor was refined into an endless drive to succeed in my academics, particularly my math and science classes. In school, others had always terrorized me, but now, for the first time, others had given me direction and ambition. Now, just like any other plant, my growth demands outside resources. Receiving this scholarship would allow me to continue my growth upward, reaching for the sky and designing machines that will fly even higher. Finding acceptance in the Muslim community, I have them to thank for my passion and success.