Could you make comments and suggestions on my college essay please ?

Hello! I am a high school student from Macau. I will be studying aboard in the US in the fall of 2025 as an international student, and it is quite a challenge for a non-native writer and speaker to write a US college essay.

Could you make some comments and suggestions on my college essay please?

I know the word limit for the Common App essay is 650, and my essay exceed that, and I will shorten that later, but please let me know what do you think about this essay in general. Thank you very much🙏!!

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In March 2023, I watched the re-screening of “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and fell in love with its multiverse setting. One scene, in particular, deeply resonates with me. The scene portrays how a single decision can drastically change the course of one’s life. In this scene, the main character, Evelyn, finds that if she hadn't eloped with Waymond, her future husband, she would have become a famous martial arts actress. Instead, in reality, she ends up running a struggling laundromat.

One of my pivotal decisions happened five years ago. It was the summer of 2019, just after I graduated from primary school. It was about a passion that had been with me since childhood.

Since I was a kid, I knew I really enjoyed building and inventing things. I spent most of my childhood playing with the tools and parts in my father's construction workshop. Once, because I didn't want to water the plants on the balcony individually, I built an automatic sprayer for plants by cutting a PVC pipe and drilling holes at intervals to water six plants all at once. During primary school, I joined the school’s handmade workshop to continue pursuing my love of creating and inventing.

However, I realized I wanted more than just following the instructions of a robot kit manual; I want to create, not just assemble. Therefore, during the summer after I graduated from primary school, I started experimenting and engaging with Arduino, a microcontroller. My first Arduino project was an LCD timer with a buzzer and a force sensor on the seat that reminds me to stand up if I’ve been sitting too long. While working on this project, I experienced a deep and fulfilling enthusiasm that was entirely new to me, and I knew I had truly fallen in love with this feeling. Afterward, I decided to take it a step further. I planned to add a Bluetooth feature and create a mobile app to remind me to stand up through notifications. After some research, I designed the UI for my mobile app using MIT App Inventor. However, I faced a bottleneck while struggling to establish Bluetooth communication between the Arduino UNO and my mobile app. (I had no idea why the Arduino received a number when the mobile app sent a character). Despite my best efforts—spending days debugging, googling, and trying to solve the issue—I couldn't figure it out.

My 12-year-old self realized that he could either continue debugging on his own, devoting more time and effort to solving the problem, or seize the opportunity to reach out to the high school teachers and upperclassmen, ask for help, and hopefully make connections with them.

I had a lot of concerns. I feared being rejected or not taken seriously. It was such a struggle to take that first step in an unfamiliar environment. After much internal struggle, I gathered my courage and took my Arduino kit (which I bought from Taobao) with me, as the evening settled in, I found myself standing at the entrance of the high school workshop, in front of a sturdy metal door with a small side window. I took a glance through the small side window and saw some senior students working on their projects, some chatting in groups. Doubt filled my mind, I paced back and forth with trembling hands and felt even more like an outsider (though I was, literally). Then, at that moment, I knew that this was a chance I couldn't afford to miss. I gripped my Arduino kit even tighter, and pushed the door open.

That evening marks the start of a six-year journey that ignites my passion for electromechanical engineering, physics, math, and science overall. It was then that I met two mentors for engineering: Mr. Lei and Mr. Wong. Mr. Lei guided me through countless engineering challenges. He taught me the fundamentals of programming (namely Processing, Python and C++), mechanical design (Fusion 360 CAD design), and Arduino development. Through the projects he guided me on, he showed me that true innovation requires research, planning, execution, analysis, and, more importantly, the ability to embrace failure.

The courage I had to enter that door on that day changed the course of my life, and I recognized it as a power—the power of “jumping out of my comfort zone.” Since then, I have kept the courage from that day as a memento, and it has quietly guided me through the decisive moments in life, whether it was building a website portfolio from scratch, asking for an interview at a PC repair company even though I didn’t know how to fix a computer, deciding to study abroad or delivering a presentation in an essay competition. I remind myself of the power of stepping out of my comfort zone every time I need to make a challenging decision in life, trusting that my future self will appreciate the decision, even if it doesn’t turn out perfectly. Just like the story of Evelyn; in the end, even though she knows that eloping with Waymond means doing laundry and taxes every day, she still finds beauty in that life.

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