Written submission

[Chris Cooper]

Every since I was a kid I wanted to know how things worked. I was always pulling apart gadgets and appliances around the house, making my dad angry in the process; however he was always happy to see me learn. My dad would let me help him work on his car. As I would pass him tools he would teach me the operations and functions of the car’s machinery. I would marvel at the clever design of the car and the genius of its engineering.I became an engineering student because I liked high school science classes. I naively checked the engineering box when I applied to colleges because I thought it would be fun, not necessarily because I wanted a secure job with good pay. Although I have always been passionate about science, my active participlation and individual experience with the sciences have been fundamentally and irreversible altered since coming to college.In high school I preferred the sciences because I believed that science was the only truly objective way to understand the world. Inevitably I was enlightened and deeply humbled by the realization that the sciences are equivalently subjective as any other human discipline. Initially I was disappointed, even disheartened by this truth. However I survived this stage of disillusionment and emerged an even more faithful and pious follower of science. From studying science, not only do I know more about the world, but my capacity for understanding it has vastly increased. Although science cannot fully illuminate all truth, it can elucidate profound mysteries and make quantifiable that which appears immeasurable. Science enriches the human experience for this reason. I am an engineer because I love the attempt of measuring the immeasurable.