Short Answer Please briefly elaborate on one of your extracurricular activities or work experiences in the space below or on an attached

sheet (150 words or fewer). Website design is a form of unique artistic expression. Each website contains within it an entirely new graphical concept, a novel flavor tailored to the needs of the client. A distinctive potpourri of the latest cutting-edge technologies is employed to create the ultimate experience, whether it be increased interactivity or enhanced aesthetics. Like an artist at his easel, a website designer begins with an empty slate, summoning all his past knowledge to create inventive color schemes, vibrant graphics, and most importantly dynamic content. The logo in itself often becomes evocative of the entire mood exuded by the website. Working as a self-employed web designer for several years, I have learned the idiosyncrasies of cyber-art, and left my lasting legacies in those virtual pages. With each stroke, I paint an identity, one that materializes the mere whim of an imagination into reality. The website is my masterpiece, the programming my chisel. Personal Essay Please write an essay (250 words minimum) on a topic of your choice or on one of the options listed below, and attach it to your application before submission. Please indicate your topic by checking the appropriate box. This personal essay helps us become acquainted with you as a person and student, apart from courses, grades, test scores, and other objective data. It will also demonstrate your ability to organize your thoughts and express yourself. 1. Evaluate a significant experience, achievement, risk you have taken, or ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you. 2. Discuss some issue of personal, local, national, or international concern and its importance to you. 3. Indicate a person who has had a significant influence on you, and describe that influence. 4. Describe a character in fiction, a historical figure, or a creative work (as in art, music, science, etc.) that has had an influence on you, and explain that influence. 5. A range of academic interests, personal perspectives, and life experiences adds much to the educational mix. Given your personal background, describe an experience that illustrates what you would bring to the diversity in a college community, or an encounter that demonstrated the importance of diversity to you. 6. Topic of your choice.

While my friends spend hours doing their homework, I spend that time programming nifty applications to do it for me. Call me a nerd, but being able to do homework 57% more efficiently (I checked) than my peers gives me a quiet, almost ineffable sense of joy that makes it all worthwhile. In many ways I am like a small, brown Superman with glasses, except instead of a fortress of solitude I have a room cluttered with a mess of wires that I trip over when I try to get in. Oh, and I don't have superpowers. Just as Superman has Clark Kent, I too have an alter ego. By day I am an ordinary Indian child, hiding behind thick glasses that cloak me from those who do not know my secret. By night I am far more heroic, able to pound out hundreds of lines of code in mere seconds (slight exaggeration). Yet unlike Superman, I wasnt born a Kryptonian, with staggering

superpowers granted at birth. Instead, I was shaped by a series of peculiar, coincidental events largely dictated by chance. Three years ago, I meandered into the Torrey Pines computer science club. Walking in, I expected to see a bunch of feeble techies with glasses thicker than mine, hunching and muttering absently to their computers, but instead I was greeted by epic virtual robot battles, commandeered by the same innocuous kids I passed in the hallways every day. Now I too knew their secret. As I admired the games and cool applications these elite gurus had written, I thought the code looked deceptively simple. Nevertheless, something peculiar had happened that day. Underneath my ostensibly composed exterior, the heart of a programmer began to slowly beat. Eager to create a program of my very own, I huddled over my computer, watching cryptic lines of code materialize with the deft strokes of my fingertips on the keyboard below. Yet, this initiation into programming was by no means the smooth ride that I had originally envisioned; it was riddled with bugs. Unfortunately, I had found my kryptonite in these destabilizing error messages. As a beginner, I felt let down. How could others deal with constant errors in their program even when the logic seemed so flawless? I held back mutinous thoughts against my computer, as I painstakingly went through the logic again. My thinking had not yet evolved, thus I hated the rampant bugs the paragons of evil which went hand in hand with bad style and defective logic. After months of meticulous programming, I took up the task of writing a Scrabble solver, but my program would not find the best word efficiently enough. My computer kept spitting back an out of memory error. Scanning the code again, I realized that my program was stuck in an endless loop. It was no wonder the computer kept complaining, quite assertively, about memory problems. Without the error message, I would have been kept in a state of delusional uncertainty, unable to find which part of my program was causing the bug. Thus, I began to cherish these bugs as guides who offered helpful counsel about the program. They kept me pushing, striving for that paramount state of perfection. It wasnt about the beauty of the code, but about how I used these miscalculations and kept my patience through any dysfunctional code. As the bugs evolved, so did I, constantly altering my thinking, trying atypical tricks, and employing inventive methods to appease their suggestions. Even when solving the scrabble program, I wasnt only engrossed in finding the coveted solution. As I thought about the problem, unlimited solutions flashed through my mind. I realized that it was this act of picking a viable path, believing in it, and seeing it through to fruition that mesmerized me. The solution could be as creative as I desired, not bound by any rigid outlines. The more abstract the program became, the more I found myself entering the hack mode a state of euphoria in which I was inseparable from the computer. Like Keats found himself

capable of transcending his body, open to the uncertainties and mysteries of life in his theory of negative capability, I too found myself most efficient and imaginative in this hack mode. Superman fights crime because his powers mandate that responsibility. I program because I love the challenge. I program because I know everything can be improved. I program because I know that there is always a more efficient, more elegant solution to a problem. I program because I feel it necessary to automate all the mindless, time consuming things I have to do. I program because I have neurons in place of wires, a brain in place of a CPU, and a heart in place of a battery. This endeavor for perfection no doubt allows me to see associations quicker, but it also provides a daily testament to the greatest computer of all, the human brain. Slowly my code became more complex, more convoluted and more inaccessible; still I found a paradoxical solace in this progression. Yet, I cannot think of a greater feeling than adding that last line of code: /(\w[\w\\'\w]+\w)|([\w\'])+|(\.[0-9]+[\-\w]+)/ .

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