Friday, October 30, 2009

NSF Personal Essay Upgrade to 2.0

I became an engineer because I felt that I could directly and unambiguously make a positive impact by building things people need. At the same time, I always knew that there is almost never a purely technological solution. That is why I have always been interested in policy and I have organized events such as the 2009 MIT Sustainability Summit. Through the conference, I was introduced to system dynamics as a way of approaching complex problems such as climate change. Finally, I can combine my interests in socioeconomic issues, math, and engineering by becoming a systems engineer, designing technology policy about energy generation and usage using mathematical modeling.

I studied electrical engineering as an undergraduate because of my first lab experience in the Introduction to Circuits class. What once seemed like very complicated equations on a piece of paper sprang to life and I understood it intuitively once I could probe it in real time. However, the tangibility of the system was not important; it was that the math represented a real system. I found that I especially liked control theory when I took a class on Feedback and Control. Since control theory is central to robotics, I took a year off from school after my junior year to work at a robotics company, Boston Dynamics.

My year off was very productive and personally transformative. I started a blog of ideas to practice communicating my thoughts and ambitions, which was really important to my personal development. I had noticed that many of my male colleagues were much more in the habit of thinking about projects and ideas than I or my female colleagues were. I believe this contributes to the gender discrepancy in achievement after high school. To avoid perpetuating that pattern, I read and blogged about current events, climate change, foreign policy, food production policy, and other social issues. I have continued to blog and do independent research ever since then. I have also encouraged my friends to contribute to my blog, and some of them have started their own blogs about their interests and projects.

Some books I read that made an impression on me are BreakThrough by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, advocates of a paradigm shift for environmentalism, BlowBack by Chalmers Johnson, who writes about the consequences of shortsighted foreign policy, Natural Capitalism by Paul Hawken and Amory Lovins, who recommend new business models for a sustainable world, and World Dynamics by Jay Forrester, founder of system dynamics. All of these books present problems as complex integrated systems and foster a holistic world view. Solutions need to be designed with a better understanding of the whole system to ensure long term effectiveness and minimize adverse unintended consequences.

During my year off, I considered wider impacts of my career and how to combine my broader interests in policy and social issues with engineering. I had learned about various applications for electrical engineering and possible career paths by working at several different companies. In addition to the robotics company, I worked at an RFID company, Tagsense, and a startup making an electronic training device for athletes, Reaction Time LLC. I decided I wanted to develop technology for efficient resource use. I did not know if this should be the number one national priority, but I knew that it would be necessary sooner or later. I studied power electronics and worked on wireless sensor networks. Since graduating, I have been working at a power electronics company, Synqor, a leader in efficient power converters and inverters.

Outside of work and school, I continued to think about social issues and policy questions. To support programs I liked, I worked tutored low income students during fall of junior year at City on a Hill School and MATCH School the summer after my junior year. MATCH is a charter high school for low income students, and the summer program was for incoming freshmen who needed to be brought up to baseline math and reading levels. The theory is that the success of these students is contingent most on one-on-one attention and high expectations for them to live up to. The student I worked with scored a 54% on the math diagnostic at the beginning of the program, and at the end of the five week program she scored 94% on the same test. I was really proud of her, and it was a very rewarding experience.

The summer after sophomore year and the summer after I graduated, I worked for the MIT Women's Technology Program as a resident tutor. The program is for high school girls interested in math and science to come to MIT and take a few classes taught and tutored by female MIT students. The goal is to build their self-confidence while challenging them academically. Besides technical skills, women need to develop a habit and a support structure for thinking ambitiously about projects they want to do. WTP provides a safe environment for them to practice taking risks without feeling intimidated by male colleagues. I continue to be a mentor for some of the young women I have met through this program. I love being a part of changing the education and gender equality paradigms.

However, my greatest passion is sustainability, and I wonder about what would really make the most impact in bringing about a transition to sustainable living. It can only be possible if the best and the brightest students in every field are working on projects related to sustainability rather than considering it a separate career path. I had been director of the lecture committee of the MIT Lecture Series Committee and put together many events targeted at MIT undergraduates including a lecture with the hosts of the MythBusters, a popular TV show on the Discovery Channel. It was a sold out event, attended by over 1200 people. After organizing that event, I realized that I had an amazing platform for broadcasting ideas I wanted to promote.

I put together a lecture event in February 2008 called The Big Picture Panel on Sustainable Energy, which would feature four MIT professors from different fields to talk about how their work is related to sustainability and climate change. It was the kickoff event for the Focus on Climate Change Symposium, which was a series of smaller departmental talks. The Big Picture Panel was attended by over 250 people. I was the lead organizer, and two other student volunteers helped with the logistics, the message, and the publicity.

I then helped to organize the first student-run conference on sustainability, the MIT Sustainability Summit in April 2009. It was a one day conference with three panels moderated by MIT faculty, three keynote speeches, and six smaller talks with leaders in industry, the public sector, and academia. The conference was attended by over 250 people including students, faculty, business people, people working in the public sector, and alumni. I took a leadership role in developing the content, literature, and publicity for the summit. As a group we worked on writing the scenarios and researched potential speakers, and I finalized much of the literature for the group to use when contacting sponsors, advisers, and the general public. I invited Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus from the Breakthrough Institute to give the concluding keynote. Through working on this event, I learned about system dynamics and people using quantitative modeling methods to work on policy and technology. I immediately knew I wanted to be a systems engineer because this field utilizes all my strengths and combines my interests.

The challenges facing the nation and the world today need to be met without depleting the very resources required to maintain a high standard of living. I want to analyze long term effects of technology and policy, especially issues that have a regional, national, or even global scope. I would love to work at a think tank or research group to gain a better understanding of the system, make policy suggestions, and also be involved in implementation. I have been taking the System Dynamics Self Study online course created by Professor Jay Forrester and provided by MIT Open Courseware. An NSF grant would fund more rigorous graduate study and research. In graduate school, I will gain a strong foundation for a career in systems engineering while contributing to cutting edge research, and I will be able to work with and be mentored by leaders in the field.

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