The Subjectivity of STEM by Bipul

The Subjectivity of STEM by Bipul - April 2025 Scholarship Essay

I was that kid who did eight hours of Khan Academy every week. With the countless hours I spent in front of the screen, learning each skill using the worked examples they gave me, the process of learning the steps and solving the problem became second nature. But it was almost robotic. Even in school, we learned the steps and solved the problem. It was as if I was trapped in someone else’s choreography, dancing as a puppet attached to their strings. I had yet to discover math from the perspective of a choreographer.

To learn how to compose, I started participating in competitions like AMC and TXML. I had to contort what I knew in ways I never had before to solve these problems, each step leading to the next, finally producing an answer that felt like perfect harmony. This problem-solving was an art in and of itself. I went on to compete in more competitions like these, but the most fulfilling was TAMU’s week-long, proof-based contest. With no stress to conceive solutions immediately, my teammates and I would bounce ideas off each other in passing periods and devise solutions in our dreams. Each proof felt like a composition we refined at every step to convey its beauty to the judges.

Many people imagine mathematics as lifeless and formulaic due to a misconception of its objective nature. But math, at its core, is subjective. As a co-president of the math club, I try to bring thought-provoking topics to discuss at our meetings, like whether math was invented or discovered. The answer, we concluded, was that it was invented. Math, as we know it, is a human expression, a language we invent to define the discovered. Like with any language, we create poetry, but instead of human emotion and behavior, mathematics creates poetry with the behaviors and patterns of the universe.

I saw that, really, all of STEM had a subjective side to it. My appreciation for mathematics evolved into an appreciation for physics, computer science, and especially engineering.

Physics seems concrete because it explains our universe, but there are so many mysteries hidden in the macrocosm that the more we seek answers, the more questions we surface with. As a part of a project to desalinate water, I investigated a breakthrough theory: the photomolecular effect. It took me nearly a month just to understand everything on that paper, but the pursuit was worth it. With it, I learned how photons interact with matter, how radiation works with vibrational and rotational states, and the secrets behind electrons and electromagnetic waves.

With computer science and engineering, we get the autonomy to create whatever we please. It may be based on hard facts and logic, but we can use the unchanging to create something that changes, adapts, and learns independently. How amazing is it that we can write an algorithm to find an algorithm we can’t? My teammates and I used this idea to create a model that can determine the subtle trends in data and forecast earthquakes: an endeavor that was impossible to perform by humans’ limited knowledge of the friction underneath the miles of crust.

Electrical engineering isn’t about the circuits and semiconductors but all these elements. That is why I would like to join the honors program of the ECE department at UT and pursue a doctorate in renewable energy by contributing to research that can alter the fate we are steadily approaching. All of this subjectivity, art, creation, this is what I want to do in the future.