Cal Tech Engineering

The prospect of studying engineering is exciting to me because I have an unquenchable thirst to get to the bottom of things, and engineering provides the framework and tools to analyze and address the scientific issues that fascinate me. More importantly, it provides the ideal opportunity to apply my scientific and math-oriented skills in ways that will make a difference in the world.

For the last year, I have worked as a computer programmer in the IT branch of the Applied Research Institute of Jerusalem (ARIJ) contributing to the development of information technology in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Together with the rest of the programming team of the "GPS Palestine" program, I worked to develop a functional GPS system within the Occupied Palestinian Territory. The project began after the Israeli telecommunication companies launched an integrated GPS system functioning with various smart phones such as the iPhone 4. We started the project by collecting various up-to-date geographical data available at ARIJ and uploaded them onto www.openstreetmap.org. The development of this system accelerated when the Palestinian Authority established a naming and numbering system for the streets. The "GPS Palestine" team is currently working on the actual construction of the GPS system.

Previously, I contributed to the development of an affordable MP3 audio system to enable visually-impaired users to upload and listen to audio books. My inspiration came from my volunteer work with the National Society for the Visually Impaired, where I saw a significant need to organize and improve the audio book registry to enable users' easier access. The device that I created allows the visually impaired to hear book titles' names as they scroll and search through the audio book registry, using technology similar to Apple's iPod Shuffle's capacity to store large numbers of books with portability and a title-identification function. In order to keep our product affordable, we manufactured components in an electrical factory in Ramallah, Occupied Palestinian Territories, and our finished product cost only one-third of the price of the iPod Shuffle with a capacity that was 10 times larger.

It is projects like these that inspire my excitement to study engineering at Cal Tech. Ultimately, I hope to use my training to satisfy my intellectual curiosity in concrete ways that improve people's lives, particularly in my home community.