John Hopkins Essay

 

The bell rung. Time for the highlight of my day.

A smile crept across my face as the instructor wrote ‘Interquartile Range’ on the board; I was mesmerized by the elegant techniques that extracted meaningful conclusions from raw statistics that looked like gibberish to the eye.

Barely able to control my excitement, I sharpened my pencil just as the lecture began. “The interquartile range for a given set of data shows…”

He never got the chance to finish. An explosion jolted the room, throwing him off his feet. Gunfire. As I scrambled to my feet to barricade the door and kill the lights, my classmates rushed to the teacher who was sprawled motionless on the ground. More shots. Sirens wailed in the distance. Some of the girls started crying. My parents’ faces came before my eyes.

Is this how I die?  

After what seemed like an eternity, a megaphone announced that the premises were ‘all-clear’ and special forces had surrounded our school to deter any subsequent strike. Later, we learned that a bomb had detonated in the commercial sector 100m from our school, killing 10 and injuring dozens. The gunfire we heard was actually warning shots from our guards who thought the school was under attack as the images of the brutal APS School Massacre were still fresh in everyone’s minds.

As we resumed school the next day with snipers on the roof and an indefinite ban on outdoor activities, I understood why learning must go on, the only way forward to rise from this violence that threatens to undo our lives.

For this purpose, I am drawn towards Johns Hopkins as it does not only places an intense emphasis on learning and research but also aims to bring the same zeal to prisoners and underprivileged children through the Jail Tutorial Project and Circle K respectively. Moreover, I’m also eager to share my experiences (with food procurement and insecurity) and cultural cuisine through the Campus Kitchen at JHU, striving to establish life-long relations with my neighbors in Baltimore.

On the academic front, I freak out at the possibility of analyzing data-driven public policy under Collen Stuart, who has made some remarkable strides in this regard under the BIG initiative. Eager to dip my toes in business and politics to understand how our world functions, JHU provides me with the ultimate ease in exploring who I am as a person.