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1 Fulbright Application Essay On one hot late-summer day when I was in high school, my parents came back from a shopping trip with a surprise present for me: the legendary board game, Diplomacy. At first I scoffed at such an old-fashioned game. Who would want to waste glorious sunny days moving armies around a map of pre-World War I Europe, pretending to be Bismarck or Disraeli? But after playing the game once, I became absolutely riveted by the nuances of statecraft, and soon began losing sleep as I tried to craft clever diplomatic gambits, hatch devious schemes, and better understand the game's ever-changing dynamics. As my friends and I spent the second half of the summer absorbed by the game, my parents grinned knowingly. How could I resist being fascinated with Diplomacy, they asked me, when I incessantly read about international affairs, and liked nothing more than debating politics over dinner? How could I resist being fascinated, when I had spent most of my summers in Greece (and, much more briefly, France and England), witnessing first-hand the ways in which countries differ socially, culturally, and politically? Though my passion for foreign policy and international affairs undoubtedly dates back to high school, I never had the chance to fully develop this interest before college. Once I arrived at Harvard, however, I discovered that I could learn about international relations through both my academics and my extracurricular activities. Academically, I decided to concentrate in Government, and, within Government, to take classes that elucidated the forces underlying the relations of states on the world stage. Some of the most memorable of these classes included Human Rights, in which we discussed what role humanitarian concerns ought to play in international relations; Politics of Western Europe, in which I learned about the social, economic, and political development of five major European countries; and Causes and Prevention of War, which focused on unearthing the roots of conflict and finding out how bloodshed could have been avoided. Currently, for my senior thesis, I am investigating the strange pattern of American human rights-based intervention in the post-Cold War era, and trying to determine which explanatory variables are best able to account for it. Interestingly, I think that I have learned at least as much about international relations through my extracurriculars in college as I have through my classes. For the past three years, for instance, I have helped run Harvard's three Model United Nations conferences. As a committee director at these conferences, I researched topics of global importance (e.g. the violent disintegration of states, weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East), wrote detailed study guides discussing these subjects, and then moderated hundreds of students as they debated the topics and strove to resolve them. Even more enriching for me than directing these committees was taking part in them myself. As a delegate at other schools conferences, I would be assigned to represent a particular country on a particular UN committee (e.g. France on the Security Council). I would then need to research my country's position on the topics to be discussed, articulate my view in front of others in my committee, and convince my fellow delegates to support my position. Trying to peg down a country's elusive national interest, clashing over thorny practical and philosophical issues, making and breaking alliances - Model UN was basically a simulation of how diplomacy really works.

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Thankfully, I have also found time over the past few years to cultivate interests and skills unrelated to Model UN and foreign policy. One of the most important of these has been community service. As a volunteer for Evening With Champions, an annual ice-skating exhibition held to raise money for children with cancer, and as a teacher of a weekly high school class on current events and international affairs, I have, whenever possible, used my time and talents to benefit my community. Another more recent interest of mine is the fascinating realm of business. Two years ago, my father's Christmas present to me was a challenge rather than a gift: he gave me $500,but told me that I could keep it only if I invested it in the stock market - and earned a higher rate of return than he did with another $500. Since then, I have avidly followed the stock market, and become very interested in how businesses interact and respond to strategic threats (perhaps because of the similarities between business competition and the equally cutthroat world of diplomatic realpolitik). A final passion of mine is writing. As the writer of a biweekly column in the Independent, one of Harvard's student newspapers, I find very little as satisfying as filling a blank page with words - creating from nothing an elegant opinion piece that illuminates some quirk of college life, or induces my readers to consider an issue or position that they had ignored until then. Because of my wide range of interests, I have not yet decided what career path to follow into the future. In the short run, I hope to study abroad for a year, in the process immersing myself in another culture, and deepening my personal and academic understanding of international affairs. After studying abroad, my options would include working for a nonprofit organization, entering the corporate world, and attending law school. In the long run, I envision for myself a career straddling the highest levels of international relations, politics, and business. I could achieve this admittedly ambitious goal by advancing within a nonprofit group, think tank, or major international company. Perhaps most appealingly, I could also achieve this goal by entering public service and obtaining some degree of influence over actual foreign policy decisions - that is, becoming a player myself in the real-life game of Diplomacy. : http://www.internationalstudent.com

. 2 Ive always had a fascination, or rather, a sort of veneration for Scientific Management, and of course, Taylorism. Many didnt approve my idea of wasting time on a degree in Operations Research and Management Science, or so they called it. But for me, the plan was always the same: Follow my heart. Wild as it may seem, losing out on a chance to do an MBA and straightaway getting into the higher salary brackets, pursuing a career in Operations Research, a not so illustrious career choice as thought by many Indians, was what confused many people. Yes I have a dream, that of running an organization of my own, but I have my own ways of going about it. This was all they got from me. I made my choice, to pursue a challenge, a passion. A choice to diverge from the mainstream path into an exclusive specialization in a single intellectual realm, with a serious commitment. Getting an M.B.A. makes perfect sense for a lot of people, most M.B.A.s. are successful. But getting an M.S. in Operations Research makes even more sense in my particular case: it is the perfect academic supplement to my engineering background, one I need to become a leading

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edge high-tech consultant in the field of Management Science. Detailed technology understanding plus profound business and group skills, is a rare combination that really can get the career rocket roaring and this is the mix of knowledge and skill I intend to gain during my graduate program in Operations Research. This is certainly true for me, and I think that this is one of my most important and convincing reasons for taking up a degree in Management Science. I can make a niche for myself, specialize in something as sound in theory and practice as OR, yet not wanting in any of the skills needed by a manager. Having spent considerable time in the field during my internships at the Defense Research and Development Lab, the Nuclear Fuel Complex and Voith Turbo, an exclusively Operations Research oriented career certainly is the opposite of what I am interested in. No error, but that is what I exactly do not want. A specialization very dedicated can work wonders with a career but one that is too completely stuck does not. Guaranteed career progression comes only of mastering a core competence yet not lacking other relevant skills. This I believe in, and hence follow. During my internship at DRDL, I was assigned to the Production Planning and Control Division, and was asked to lead a group of 5 to work on various jobs like Scheduling, Machine Assignment, Resource Allocation and Routing. It was a demanding job, especially because we had to learn it the hard way. No teachers, only books. A mistake was unimaginable. We hadnt yet come across the subject of OR in the class work as it was scheduled in the next semester. We groped to solution by Trial-and-Error method and often, speculations. Only after some advice from senior officers did we get to know of the existence of a mathematical theory for all such problems. The science of Operations Research. In subsequent internships, I worked with other teams in developing OR solutions and generating algorithms. We even developed software for Voith Turbo. It was then that I was caught in the intrigue of OR. So what is it I am truly interested in? I want to be where the wars of business are fought, with brains as weapons. I want to go to office at 9, with a handful of challenges and come back home at 5, satisfied that I could win a few of my not-so-easy wars, and learnt a couple of lessons about what not to do. This is where, I believe, I can make my best contribution. In short, I want to be where the action and the challenges are. I want to be where I am not guaranteed an easy job, but where I have to face challenges that always find me. For the career I want to make, in terms of abilities, I believe I am well equipped with my engineering background. OR demands a lot of quantitative skills, and Ive had 24 credits of Math in my degree. I have scored a 740 on the GMAT, with a 92% in Math. As for the programming element, in addition to the C language included in my undergraduate course, I have acquired proficiency in other contemporary programming languages, viz. C++, Visual Basic and Java. In terms of attitude, I have never felt more confident and positive. Through industrial exposure, I have come a long way in getting myself prepared for the task. And here are my concrete plans after graduation: I shall take up a job for some time in an organization dedicated to providing OR solutions to gain the necessary work experience. It can be in the UK, or Europe or Asia. I aspire to come back to India after graduation and start an enterprise of my own, committed to providing OR solutions and giving the essential commercial exposure to the science in the Indian industry. But frankly, these are just a few options I can

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pinpoint now, and I am sure that many more will become apparent through my experience during the program. Abiding by my belief in continuing education, I plan to pursue a part-time degree in Decision Support Systems, which is a bridge between the hard technique oriented science of OR and the soft practice centric Management. Apart from aspiring a successful career, I have always tried to balance my economic wants and my social responsibilities. I do not call myself a social activist but I never let a chance to get involved in community development pass by. I had a chance during my first year of college, which was not as demanding as the subsequent years were, to participate in a pilot project by the Tata Consultancy Services, a literacy campaign making use of sophisticated audio-visual aids and state-of-theart computer software. Throughout the summer vacation, I immersed myself in the campaign, and to be very frank, was satisfaction personified when I saw my adult students being able to read a newspaper in the local language. The second participation was in social data acquisition. It was a micro-level planning campaign by the state government that needed huge educated manpower. Engineering students from various colleges were invited to join the campaign and I did utilize the chance to take up some social responsibility. Some day, I hope to balance these two facets of my life, closest to perfection, and shall be in pursuit till then. : http://writing4students.blogspot.com

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