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I was born in India in November, 1989. Throughout my childhood, I have always been fascinated by puzzles and riddles. Because of my elder sister, I was always expected to understand things more quickly and of higher standard. When we played family games, I was challenged more than any one else in the house. One of those tough competitions was chess, which transformed my life into strategizing and problem solving. Since then, challenges have become integral part of my life. ��� Up till the eighth grade, I studied in India. I learned Hindi (national language of India), Gujarati (regional language) and Sanskrit. Only in the last few years there, I learned the basics of English. My parents always wanted me to learn music and art. During my childhood, I had private lessons for art and classical Indian music. My passion for art still continues today. I learned vocal and instrumental (harmonium) classical music for four years, but when I came here, I left the seven year program of mastery. ñ When I came here in the ninth grade, first two years of high school were very difficult for me. I looked at my first history book and I remember looking up every other word in the dictionary. By the time, I read the meaning of the last word in the sentence, I already forgot about the meaning of the first word of the sentence. I survived through that time however and faced the high school challenge by taking majority of the AP courses. My high school AP computer science class introduced me to the exciting world of programming. I learned to tell the computer what I needed in the computer's language. � I also used to do small projects at the end of the chapters that were not required by the school, but I did it because the problems were very addicting. It was like any video game addiction, I never realized what time it was or how long I had been sitting on my desk working on the same code for maybe even a really small bug. Since then, my passion has become to make my career in the world of programming. During my high school years I was also part of the school tennis team. My academic activities included Math Team and Science Olympiad. In the Math Team Competition, I was qualified to play at the regional level. In the individual component of the competition, I competed at the final competition of the four counties of New York. I was also a member of the National Honor Society where I coordinated multiple events to raise funding for a good cause. When I had to make a decision about my college, it was very difficult for me to pick which one to go to. I applied to about eight colleges and was accepted to five of those and wait-listed in the others. Stony Brook was the only SUNY school that I applied to, and only as a backup, because I had decided that I would never attend a SUNY school. But then I learned about the Stony Brook's research reputation through the tours and the school's open house. I learned about the faculty's reputation and my interests perfectly matched with their research. So I decided to become a part of the Stony Brook University. As a freshman undergraduate, I study here, in the Stony Brook, in the world of programming in a computer science major.��� � � Manushi Shah |