Writing essays is scary, at least for me. I remember coming up with random essay ideas late at night and murmuring to myself- “I’m soo going to write a great essay;” and then after crafting the draft, I’d be like, “Come on, it didn’t sound this bad in my mind!”
While writing essays was a nightmare, reading them was fun; they were like mini-movies. Yet, as I’d reach the end every time, I’d be like, “How on earth do people write this T_T.” Anyway, I won’t be giving any essay writing advice as I am so terrible at it. But during the process, I did come across some fantastic resources- for example, The College Essay Guy has many great essay examples, tips, and tricks for crafting good essays. Plus, it’s got these cool brainstorming exercises that helped me find essay topics.
Anyway, so here are some of my MIT essays (not all, some of them are way too cringey to share publicly :v)
7:00. Eid starts. My six-year-old cousin sat with coconut leaves, perhaps to make the wristwatches I taught him last night. With the delightful “Laccha-Shemai” that my aunt was cooking in the kitchen, I knew the day couldn’t get better.
Already late I was, I ran for the Eid prayer. The Imam was reciting something after the prayer in Arabic, nothing I could understand. I would have left by then, but a ritual always holds me there- a hug from everyone!
As my mom says, I used to spend my days in two ways: enjoying Eid or waiting for Eid. Every year, I receive countless hugs on this single day. As my Seven uncles and thrice of that many cousins come to our village from different parts of our country, from Chittagong to Dhaka, these hugs remind me, even with that distance, how close we are in our hearts.
Diving into graph theory is always fun, but converting a non-trivial problem to a shortest-path classic to apply the “Dijkstra” algorithm on it is where my excitement reaches its peak. These algorithms have been the best thing I explored in my high school life. When I went through the problem set of “Design and Analysis of Algorithms” at MIT OCW, my hunger for algorithms amplified even further. Besides its theory-intensive classes, at MIT, embracing its undergraduate research opportunities, I can finally put my first step from solving “solved” problems to solving “unsolved” problems- and I can’t wait for that!
2nd row, 3rd column. The boy almost suffocated in excitement- “It said she has ‘eldest’ daughter, so it must be 9, 2, 2.” I looked at him- the sparks in his eyes were apparent.
After I revealed the first hint of the “Census-Taker” problem, the entire class went silent: the boy on my right started chewing the end of the pen, and another, scratching his head. Standing in front of the blackboard with chalk and a duster, I couldn’t possibly comprehend a more beautiful scene.
I always enjoyed sharing the problems and the excitement that came with them. And this workshop was my first step to spreading that excitement. Sure, everyone doesn’t have to love mathematics, but if that is because they never got to explore it beyond some equations, it becomes an injustice to math. Besides, the necessity of analytical thinking goes beyond the field of interest, which is why I chose problems that involved less mathematical knowledge and more logic.
After that three-day workshop in 2019, I realized how much I enjoyed teaching. Returning home, I opened my personal online group, where I took classes from discrete mathematics to algorithms every weekend. And that was my start; from that day, I grabbed every opportunity to see one more person chew the back of the pen, pondering a problem I gave them.
First night at “Dadubari,” my village home. My cousins voted to play “Buddhi-buddhi!”
We have a neat trick to choose a “King” for that: each of us points either one or two with our fingers; we count for the majority; and the majority gets eliminated, and the rest repeats the process to find a king among them!
As curious as I was, I wondered how many steps we’d need at most if we had a Billion players. My calculation said if none of the steps ended in a draw, it’d take at most 30 steps! Only t-h-i-r-t-y!
While playing our traditional “catch-me-if-you-can” the next day, I saw the exact opposite of it- if each infected player infects a civilian in each round, within 30 rounds, we get a billion infected players! A B-i-l-l-i-o-n!
My fascination for problem-solving largely stemmed from these little games. Through playing Werewolf and Secret Hitler, I learned to appreciate my instincts and attack a problem from different perspectives. I enjoy how I subconsciously apply “Insertion Sort” while arranging a deck of cards or “divide-and-conquer” in our modified “hide-and-seek.”
And this passion for problem-solving led me to the best things of my life, from math olympiads to competitive programming. And now, I am inclined to tackle world problems and find out solutions to problems that no one has thought of yet.