Of books I have read, of people I have met, of sights I have seen, many are significant, candidates for an essay for this application. The trouble is, just listing those that I can remember might take up more than five hundred words. Even considering only the events nominated by the well-meaning people ill with advisory anxiety, the candidate pool would still exceed the word limit. This heated counsel just concentrated the solution of possible topics without precipitating any clarity. Making a decision under such overwhelming pressure of choice is quite difficult. Last spring, no doubt, I would have been unable to make this crucial selection. Now, thanks to my summer at the Research Science Institute (RSI), I am able to make the pick with no trouble whatsoever.
I owe the lesson in making quick and easy decisions to Dr. Michael Mitzenmacher, who lectured to the RSI students to prepare them for their research projects. As a mathematician, computer scientist, and a guru of randomness, he recognized only two methods of making decisions. If opinions concerning a problem's answer differed, the mathematical truth was determined by a democratic vote. In more subjective questions, he tossed a coin to make his pick. Regardless of his seeming randomness he did not lose a single bet to students, exemplifying that even pure chance could be exploited. From this, I derived my first lesson for the summer - to make any choice only one coin is necessary, a pleasant good-bye to painful decisions.
The second lesson for the summer came as a greater surprise. The major part of the RSI was devoted to letting students do their own research in some of the great laboratories of the nation. Previously, I had worked on parts of research projects led by other people, but during the RSI, my mentor, Piotr Mitros, did not push me in any direction and only answered my numerous questions. Yet, to my mentor I owe an enormous alteration of my thinking, perhaps comparable to my starting to talk. I was working to develop an algorithm for efficiently locating sound sources based on microphone input and often talked to my mentor in the process. We discussed everything: the project, political correctness, nuclear warfare, and cafeteria food. Indeed, food was the subject of the momentous change. One day, he told me to pay attention, as he was going to tell me something that would be the most important lesson that I would derive from this summer program. To my great confusion, he proceeded to say: "Never, ever, pass up free food. Look at me. This is the single piece of life philosophy that got me this far." I still faithfully follow that advice, and hope to achieve the same result.
