Women Should Be

Admission Essay
“Women should not do that” or “that is not lady like,” are comments I grew up hearing, and one whose significance I did not initially understand. However, it was always a pain being denied the opportunity to do activities that I loved, because I was a girl. It had started with picking apart devices in the house like remote controls and toys, which always got me into trouble as I would expertly disassemble but fail in assembling them again. I would quickly turn new pink doll sets into parts instead of playing dress up with them. Due to this insistent love for tampering with devices and curiosity with field animals and insects, one can only imagine the number of times I got scolded for not towing the “lady-like” line.
As I grew older, I could now manage to reassemble the parts I had removed and stopped pulling out insect legs, hoping to insert them later. I got a small light microscope and binoculars kit that I used to explore the rich biological activity of plants and insects near our home and explore the open sky at night. With friends, we would then follow YouTube tutorials and the NASA website to understand what we saw from our escapades. My love and curiosity for science, which had in part been fuelled by the challenge to the reject the notion of “behaving like a girl”, grew. I graduated to riding and repairing bikes, an activity that came so naturally to me, to a point I was my brother’s trainer when he was learning to cycle. It was common to find me with oily hands from fixing the bike chains and trying to take apart my brother’s bike.

Luckily, I did not get scolded as much, when my many mini experiments failed since I had graduated to be the in–house “do it all”. From the one who knew what battery needed changing, to what needed repairing (if I had not made a shot at it already), I was the go-to person. I became the natural leader among my age mates from both genders. Challenges in my play group would be easily solved whenever I was around.
There has been an innate belief that women should not do specific tasks, especially those requiring grit. This has relegated us to mundane tasks as we have been conditioned by society to follow a given social construct. We thus fail to follow our dreams, which would have made us more productive citizens of the world. Over the years, this has taught me to tackle biases head on as most of them seem to stem from fear or lack of understanding, which only tend to make us live a less fulfilling life. If I was to re-live my life, I would gladly go back to learning from my mistakes and standing for what I love doing.
While at first, I found it hard to fit into a particular mindset as expected by society, I followed the road less taken and ended up watering my dreams. They have blossomed into an acute scientific mind that I would love to develop further at your institution. I hope that you will give me a chance, of which I am sure I will not let you down.