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I grew up in household buzzing with projects. From intricate porches to massive organic gardens at our elementary school, our weekends always involve building or making something. Our home has no fixed roles. Walking into our kitchen on Saturday morning, you might find my father baking apple pies with my brother and me while my mother and sister disassemble the broken dishwasher. My parents taught us how to use tools safely and encouraged my sister, brother, and I to dream up our own crazy projects. We made a “pool” by threading an old rock climbing rope through the grommets of a tarp and securing the ends to three different trees. We created “rafts” from duct tape and remnant plastic containers to float down a nearby creek. We constructed our own computers from parts bought at an electronics store. Every project was an exercise in imagination, design, planning, negotiation, and iteration. We have only 130 students in our high school. International students from China, Korea and Vietnam make up an important part of our community. I had a brief experience studying abroad in Spain and appreciated how hard it is to learn and fit into a foreign culture. I even learned to love my host mother Marta’s breakfast special, mashed eggplant. I trod lightly and made peace with my eggplant so as not to offend her Cadiz sensibilities. Since living in Spain, I’ve made time to tutor our non-native speakers in math and physics and founded a club focused on integrating our international classmates into our community. We cook dishes like Bulgogi Pork together, and we sing karaoke, badly. We talk about family, current events and life in Beijing, Saigon, and Austin. It is challenging to discuss history and world politics with my friends from China. Our reference points are different, so our conversations can be lively. You learn a lot about your own biases by listening closely to another person’s perspective. I am eager to experience more perspectives through travel and study abroad, particularly in Asia. I love living Austin, a technology wonderland with inspiration literally around every corner. Last spring, I walked five blocks from my school to sit in a small room at the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) conference and hear leading experts from Amazon and IBM debate about the dark sides of Artificial Intelligence. I walked away from this conference wanting to know more about professional programming. This summer, I applied and was selected for an electrical engineering internship at Silicon Labs, a chip design company. After years of self-study in programming, I wanted to see what software development looked like inside a big engineering company. We worked in teams and did everything from soldering circuit boards to programming microcontrollers. I learned from mentors tackling hard engineering problems in a supportive and collaborative environment. The experience confirmed what I hoped: designing and building software and hardware could be a fulfilling career for me. I can see myself thriving in that world.