Zeynep Karacan

Hello Future Innovators!

This is not a scene from A Beautiful Mind, and I don’t begin my letter by asking “Who’s going to be the next Einstein?” I have been sitting in your place last year, wondering if I, a high school student, could actually design&develop future’s inspiring Technologies. If you feel nervous or süper-excited, you can easily understand what I was feeling.

My name is Zeynep Karacan, and I am currently the valedictorian of Galatasaray High School. My main interests are applied mathematics, electrical engineering and computer science. I am also a young pianist, giving concerts for charity foundations such as Cagdas Yasam with my chamber music group, Sultani Piano Quartet. I went to Research Science Institute at MIT, the most selective program for high school students, and pursued operations research fort he first time in RSI history.My hobbies include music, ancient philosophy, debating political concepts, tango, chair-surfing (a type of wigwagging you do while sitting on a chair), going to the nearby Chinese restaurant with my fellow Galatasaray friends, and reading,thinking,analyzing and exploring at any opportunity.

I have been involved in electrical engineering research with my mentor Talha Kılıç, who supported me along the way, and helped me explore the pragmatic approach to science. I took great pleasure in putting physics formulas into real-world functioning devices. He later encouraged me to apply to RSI, which turned out to be the most memorable experiences of my life.

Academically RSI was really demanding. We had university-level classes in engineering and maths, as well as humanities. We were made to read Frankenstein prior to the program, so we had the chance to discuss all the different aspects of the novel throughout the lectures. Apart from the classes, we pursued one-on-one research with prominent professors in different fields and universities. I did operations research, which means that I modeled industry-growth problems and created complex algorrithms and models for systems to function more efficiently. I later put them together as computer science codes. At the end of 6 weeks, my mentor,the founder and CEO of Project Radix, adopted my growth model in his private business. It was such an honor to have worked with him and design applications that have real world implementation.

However, RSI was not only academics. Almost 3 days a week, we were lectured by a Nobel laureate on various topics, such as molecular biology, economics or Department of Defense innovations. The night that impacted me the most was having dinner with Prof. Noam Elkies, the youngest-ever Harvard Professor, a genius in maths and music. We had a lot to talk about and at the end of the night, he managed to explain how Chopin etude no 12 is relevant to Euclidian Algorithm. Wow.

In addition, the community of RSI and the student body far exceeded my expectations. I made really close friends, whom I still talk to every week. We played midnight frisbee on a wet field at 2 am, cooked national Turkish and Israeli food together fort he “International Night”, consumed an excessive amount of marshmellows and spent our nights playing ping-pong and discussing quantum physics, while bursting into laughter in tears. The people at RSI taught me to enjoy life&science in harmony. It was a great opportunity to be surrounded by 81 people smarter than I. Now, I am ready to take on bigger, more complex challenges. I would like to study engineering, especially Virtual

Reality applications, to understand how “virtual” the “reality” could be.I believe that the most important thing to do now for you, is to pursue what you are passionate about, and to enjoy exploring (and trying to help rewriting) “the poetry of reality”, which happens to be science.

Good luck in your research and future accomplishments…