The Radio That Spoke Two Languages
Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.
The first thing I ever fixed was my grandmother's radio. I have always been passionate about engineering. It hummed in Spanish every morning and crackled in English every night.
Somewhere between the static and the stations, I learned that fixing things is really about listening.
That summer I opened every appliance in our apartment, not to break them, but to understand what they were trying to say. The toaster clicked twice before it burned anything. The fridge groaned at 3 a.m. like it was tired of us. I kept a spiral notebook of symptoms, the way Abuela kept a notebook of prayers, and taped it inside the closet door where my mom wouldn't find it.
The radio was a Panasonic from 1987, older than my mother's green card. When the English station started cutting out, Abuela stopped listening to the news altogether. She said English was getting harder to hear anyway. It took me three weekends and a six-dollar tube of contact cleaner to find the problem: a cracked solder joint on the tuning coil, invisible until I tilted the board under her sewing lamp. When the evening announcer came back clear, she turned the volume up and made me sit with her for the whole broadcast. She didn't understand most of it. She understood that I had brought it back.
Since then I have repaired eleven radios, two box fans, and our building's buzzer, which now plays the first three notes of a song nobody can name. Last spring I started a Saturday repair table at our branch library, where Mr. Phan brings the same cassette player every month, not because it's broken, but because he likes to watch it get fixed.
This experience taught me that hard work and perseverance can overcome any obstacle. I believe engineering is about helping people, and I want to bring my passion to your university.
I still listen before I open anything. Abuela's radio sits on our kitchen counter, hissing softly between stations, and every night at nine it finds the English one on its own.