How mathematical and scientific exploration satisfy intellectual curiosity

Intellectual curiosity is a term used to describe one's desire to invest time and energy into learning more about a person, place, thing or concept. More than any other academic field, science, math and engineering satisfy my intellectual curiosity as these fields objectively demonstrate how things work in the real world. I have an unquenchable thirst to get to the bottom of things and learning more about the universe has only further enhanced my curiosity. I discovered my passion for the sciences in childhood and there has never been any doubt about what I wanted to do with my life. Engineers with their creativity, application of science and logical thinking work to create technology in order to redefine our lives and society.

My interest in engineering has developed over the course of my education and I enjoy the challenge of using my intellectual curiosity to solve everyday problems. To provide an example, I recently developed an affordable MP3 audio system to enable visually-impaired users to upload and listen to audio books. The inspiration for this engineering came from my involvement with the Palestinian National Society for the Visually Impaired. While volunteering, I saw a significant need to organize and improve the audio book registry to enable blind children to access it more easily. The device that I created enables blind children to hear the title's name as they search through the audio book registry, using technology similar to Apple's iPod Shuffle's capacity to store large numbers of books, portability and title-identification function. In order to keep our product affordable, we manufactured components in an electrical factory in Ramallah, Palestine and our finished product cost only one-third of the price of the iPod Shuffle with dimensions that were 10 times larger. This experience demonstrates how intellectual curiosity can be combined with social awareness to improve the lives of everyday people.