Culture Background

I’m Asian. More specifically, my mom is from Hong Kong and my dad is from Taiwan. Both their families come from Mainland China. However, I instead consider myself as part of a small, yet growing cultural group known as American-born Chinese. ABCs, as we frequently call ourselves, are generally young, second-generation Chinese with strong grasps on both American and Chinese culture. We stock our cabinets with both Chef Boyardee and shrimp crackers and we are fluent in “Chinglish.” I’ve grown up equally amidst both cultures and both have played an equally important role in my life.

Although you may not yet know what you want to major in, which department or program at MIT appeals to you and why?

My interest in coding began when I was nine years old, designing my Kacheek’s webpage for my Neopets account, fascinated with how my <br>’s turned into line breaks and how my <img src=”image.jpg”>’s turned into images. Years later, I was struck with this same feeling while sitting in Computer Programming class, typing lines of seemingly meaningless text into my Java IDE and watching it exactly generate my intended output and display a screen flashing, “Hello, world.” MIT’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department appeals to me because of my interest in computer science, something I hope to pursue in college.

Notes to write essay:

Family :
-hometown of my parents
-divorce
-Russian mom

Language:
-Russian language
-Kazakh language

Culture exposure:
– Malaysia (All Asian culture)