Sam Kwei


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Hi, my name is Sam Kwei. I was from San Marino, California, but recently my family moved to Naperville, Illinois. I am currently a rising junior at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). I am an EECS (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) major. I used to attend San Marino High School. I love swimming and music, especially classical and pop music. My academic interests are science and engineering. I also play both the piano and violin.

During my freshman year at MIT, I joined a program named Concourse. Within Concourse, I already took the courses of Single and Multivariable Calculus and Differential Equations with Professor John Lewis, Physics Mechanics with Professor Roberta Brawer, Physics E&M with Professor Jim Walpole, Introduction to Solid-State Chemistry with Professor Bob Rose, and Introduction to Psychology with Professor Jeremy Wolfe. I also took Actinide Chemistry Seminar with Professor Kenneth Czerwinski, who was also my freshman year advisor and UROP mentor at his Actinide Research Group.

While at MIT, I was also very heavily involved in several service organizations. I was the vice-president of Circle K or the Kiwanis International Club at MIT for 2002. I am currently the Editor and Webmaster for MIT Circle K. We constantly coordinate weekend events at children's homes such as Margaret Fuller Party and Holloween or Christmas parties for children. Circle K also hosts several activities for Salvation Army and for Project CASPAR. I am also a volunteering teacher for Communitech program, in which I teach an underprivileged family computer usage and in return they receive a free computer from MIT. I am also a pledged member of the Alpha Phi Omega service fraternity. They also host several worthwhile service activities. I also participated as a Service Team Captain during Serveathon day, a day when all Boston area residents group together to beautify environments and to renovate old and poor neighborhood. Together, we did over eight month worth of work in one day! I am very proud of my team. We planted several gardens for foster children homes.

During my college sophomore summer, I worked at Harvard Medical School's Steele Laboratory for Tumor Biology. My supervisor was Professor Rakesh Jain, a brilliant scientist yet also a very funny boss. I worked directly with both Dr. George Alexandrakis and Ricky Tong. Ricky is a cool graduate student under MIT/Harvard's joint Health, Science, and Technology (HST) Program. George received his bachelor's degree from Oxford, and is currently a post-doc researching at the laboratory. I was very fortunate to be able to work with these two brilliant men under the guidance of my wonderful supervisor, Professor Jain. I helped to write several C++ and Java codes to assist the analyzation of tumor cell data, and I also performed some in-vitro experiments with live mouse! :D It was fun experimenting, but it was also very sad that I had to kill the mice using "Fatal-Plus." Overall, I learned a lot from this internship and hope to continue during this coming Fall term as well.

During my college freshman summer, I worked at the Geophysical Institute at Fairbanks, Alaska. I am involved in the MODIS project, which makes use of satellite imagery to detect and investigate unexplorable areas. Part of my internship this summer includes creating a MODIS Research Website for my advisor, Dr. Shusun Li. All of my research data and graphs are also posted on this website as well as some of my Alaskan adventures photos :).

In the evenings of Tuesday and Thursday, I used to take electronics courses at Pasadena City College while I was still a senior in high school. On Saturdays, I used to work as a volunteer at Tzu-Chi Free Clinic. It is fun and awarding to help people!

My favorite colleges are Princeton, MIT, Caltech, Harvard, and University of California, Berkeley. I felt very happy and fortunate that I was offered admissions to MIT, Princeton, Caltech, Cornell, UC Berkeley - EECS, UCLA - CS, and UC Santa Barbara College of Creative Studies - CS.

My Biology teacher in high school was Mr. I. He is a really fun person with excellent character. My calculus, computer science, and statistics teacher in high school was Dr. Armbruster. He is also a very fun person providing students with many valuable opportunities. He has an ingenious mind. My two great English teachers from high school were Ms. Diane Bonfils and Dr. Nancy Beagle. Ms. Bonfils is very kind and encouraging to her students while Dr. Beagle spices up her students' academic lives with her humor. My high school chemistry teacher was Ms. Cynthia Chubbuck, who I believe is one of the most dedicated teachers. My funniest teacher from high school was Mr. Scott Cameron, who taught me AP Physics. My high school counselor was Dr. Regina Schaefer, who now teaches at the University of LaVerne in the counseling masters program.

I love Pokémon because each one of them is so special and unique, reminding me that each human being is also unique and special in his own ways. I wish I can have a Pokémon too.

Please come back soon and visit me.