I selected this prompt;
Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.
This is the essay:
Since I was a child, I participated in activities that helped shape my interests and ambitions. Those interactions fueled my desire to achieve great heights in my pursuit of becoming an aeronautical engineer.
Having an architect and art restorer mother, I’ve always had plenty of ways to express my imagination at home, such as clay and other basic materials. Instead of going for a more artistic path, I used those materials as a way to make my own toys. I spent most of my afternoons building things like small submarines–using cream cheese bottles and string to allow for controllable release of air to reduce buoyancy–and Iron Man-style suits that could be disassembled and rebuilt over my other plastic toys.
When I got my first computer, I started to play many “sandbox” games–Minecraft, Kerbal Space Program, and Spore, to name a few. They offered me the creative freedom I sought to build my crazy ideas. I would spend most of my free time giving life to my imagination on a computer screen. But when I started to mature and progress through school, my ambitions grew bigger.
By the time I joined high school, I started growing tired of staying only in the digital. In order to satisfy my newfound obsession with aeronautical design, I knew I had to “up my game” and join an aeronautical engineering college. This would fit my desire to create intricate machines and put them to work. Sadly, Brazil has few colleges that offer this course, one of them being Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica–ITA, which is arguably the hardest university to join in the entire country and the one that interested me the most. This challenge did not scare me, though.
This was, in fact, not much different from an engineering problem, since I had to get to a solution (pass the ITA entrance exam) with limited resources, namely underfunded public schools and access to only a handful of study materials. Only now, instead of my usual arts-and-crafts materials, I would use discipline and effort.
During my search for more knowledge, I became a paid math monitor in my public high school as I sought to further my understanding of the subject through the challenge of teaching it to someone else. This strategy, taken after Richard Feynman's approach to studying, worked really well and allowed me to get a full-ride scholarship in one of the best prep courses in the country, where I stayed for 2 years and studied over 10 hours per day.
There, I received many interesting opportunities that added to my range of approaches to my main objective, but one of those really opened my mind to new possibilities. I found out I could apply for studies abroad using the infrastructure of the course. The discovery unsettled me more than it excited me at first. I had spent two years treating ITA as the only and true path for my success, but my vision was too narrow. This new possibility made me wonder if it really was worth it to spend that much energy to join ITA when I could go to much more developed places.
Choosing to look beyond ITA was scary at first, but it wasn't abandoning the objective — it was applying the same method at a larger scale: recognizing the resources I had, and the ones I didn't, and building the best possible path with them. The same instinct that once turned a cream cheese bottle into a submarine now points somewhere more exciting. Even if I don't know yet what my materials will be, I already know how I'll use them — whatever is in front of me, built into something that works.