Prompt (Rutgers Honors College)
You indicated interest in honors community consideration and participation. Please share with us your concept of an educational challenge that interests you, and how you anticipate meeting this challenge at Rutgers through your involvement in an honors program. (500 words)
Essay
How can we preemptively manage damage caused by natural disasters?
From packing a donation box with fresh produce to learning how robotics innovation can protect cities, I have become increasingly passionate about engineering, having seen the way people and communities continuously show up for each other.
While engineering has always fascinated me, from my childhood memories of Jenga to my first middle school robotics team meets, my high school years helped me understand the potential for innovation to solve pressing problems and large-scale issues—and to protect people and communities.
With Rutgers Honors College’s richer course options, extracurricular opportunities, and professional advising, I hope to learn more about innovations that can anticipate the effects of natural disasters and increase community preparedness.
Drawn to Rutgers’s interdisciplinary, project-based approaches, I could unite my passion for technology and engineering with people-oriented sustainable solutions.
Fortunate enough to have been able to conduct academic research with mentors from UCLA, I was involved in robotic assessments of infrastructure damage after earthquakes. I was confronted by a true intellectual and environmental challenge, asking myself and the researchers around me: How can we preemptively manage the damages that befall us from natural disasters? While I helped code, I have much to learn about methods of prevention, research tools, as well as the collaboration behind designing, testing, and launching innovations that can provide safety and security for people on a grander scale.
I am captivated by Rutgers’s unique opportunities for undergraduate research. I could participate in research initiatives like the collaborative projects on the structural health monitoring of representative cracks in the Manhattan Bridge with Professor Saeed Babanajad.
With courses like Environmental Engineering Analysis Tools, I can better understand how engineers address both environmental and community-specific metrics to conceptualize innovations more targeted to a specific community, merging my interests in coding and software with environmental disasters. From defining problem scope to planning effectively for solutions to environmental challenges, I hope to expand my reach to hands-on design with knowledge built through sustainability and air quality concerns.
The opportunity to witness my contribution to solutions with impacts on community health outcomes excites me. With the Rutgers CHANGE program, I could help inspire new generations of young engineers to address environmental and community innovation across different local demographics. I am inspired by the prospect of seeing how I might be able to have an impact for communities and individuals around me.
The Rutgers Honors College would allow me to flourish academically and professionally–while providing me with the tools to imagine better futures for myself, the local community surrounding me, and the populations across the world all unanimously vulnerable to the same impending environmental crisis.
Tips for Writing
- Brainstorm any idea that interests you that you would like to learn more about.
- Write them all down.
- Look for clubs and research opportunities in the college you are applying to that relate it the interest stated before.
- Think about any activities that you have done that relate to this idea and connect your interest with this activity.
- Start writing without worrying about structure and grammar.
- Just try to get the idea out and do tweaking later.
- Though 500 words seems daunting, it will seem like you need more after you finish your first draft.
- Think about what the Honors College will bring you and how it will advance your life.
- You will need this for the conclusion.