Inspired By Many by Kashyap Varma

Inspired By Many by Kashyap Varma - November 2022 Scholarship Essay

Rather than one person, class, or activity, I believe that I am deeply impacted by learning from the lived experiences of my community members and approaching my academics with an interdisciplinary focus. As a volunteer at the Foothill Unity Center, I connect with people from diverse walks of life. Working alongside ex-convicts, immigrant families, and even well-off individuals in serving my community has allowed me to absorb diverse viewpoints and cultivate new values. Moreover, listening to and understanding the struggles of these individuals has made me far more grateful of my environment and has motivated me to do more for my community. Following COVID-driven isolation and reflecting on my own struggles with mental health during the quarantine, I began volunteering with Kids Support Group, a youth action initiative determined to provide high schoolers much-needed lessons about maintaining positive mental health and introduce wellness activities to help them achieve peace of mind. Likewise, I have been able to support peers academically in their transition from online to in person learning as an ACS tutor in my high school (primary focus on STEM topics).

Within the realm of my own education, I embrace interdisciplinary opportunities to enhance my problem-solving, critical thinking, and engineering mindset, along with also improving my collaboration and written and oral communication skills. As a member of my schools competitive Constitution Team, I thrive when working with teammates to analyze contemporary issues and potential solutions at the intersection of computing, business, healthcare, environmental sustainability, the arts, and public policy development. Likewise, Academic Decathlon is an avenue for me to explore math, science, history, art, music, economics, and literature and to draw relevant connections between these various subjects. To build upon these experiences, Destination Imagination (DI) has allowed me to cultivate my engineering mindset in non-traditional ways. By emphasizing on-the-spot problem solving, critical thinking, and creativity all within a competitive environment, DI requires that I think and act like an engineer whether I am creating an impromptu performance or constructing a device out of household items.

Fueled by my high school experiences, I plan to build upon my interdisciplinary learning both inside and out of Computer Engineering. For one, I will undertake accelerated and graduate-level courses, to pursue a BS/MS so that I can strengthen skills useful in advanced research, perhaps relating to theory, algorithm design, and information systems. While pursuing year-long and summer research I want to learn more about novel hardware design, Large-scale Symbolic Systems, and modeling with ML and AI, a ‘bucket list’ of interests that will perhaps help me master computing innovations needed to address NAE’s Grand Challenges. Specifically, I am interested in developing/implementing/testing new mathematical techniques, software, and hardware for high performance computers. In analyzing this challenge, I recognize the incredible value of high-performance computing by developing reliable simulations of given issues, such as energy grid attacks, and delivering a real-time correction through AI for IT Operations (AIOps). These solutions help reduce manual incident-management tasks and increase productivity. This predictive and preventative IT approach is available in its early stages, such as Cisco’s partnership with Kubernetes to work on the Kubeflow project (study to deploy ML workflows on Kubernetes platform to provide an effective way to deploy “best-of-breed” open-source systems). Parallel to these endeavors, I plan to partake in several humanities, political science, and economics courses to better understand the implications of our rapidly evolving technology on various parts of our society. Inspired by innovators working in interdisciplinary environments to solve global problems I want to draw upon diverse knowledge, skills, and lived experiences to analyze and address issues at the crossroads of our dynamic technological, socio-economic, and political environments. As a budding computer engineer, I embrace Albert Einstein’s emphasis of the creative nature of design, whereby “creativity is the ability to produce work that is both novel and appropriate.”

All things considered listening and learning from other people’s lived experiences empowers me to serve others in meaningful and impactful ways and to grow as an individual. Moreover, pursuing an interdisciplinary and diversified education in high school has inspired me to tailor my future college experience with not just technology but also social-science, economics, and political science in mind.