For WU Mylonas: Please use the space below to state why you have chosen to study the academic discipline associated with the scholarship program you are seeking. You may include comments about both your academic interests and professional/career goals.

Computer programming is similar to other forms of writing. Depending on its length and purpose, a good computer program can be an anecdote, a short story, an essay, or a novel. Look at Microsoft Word 6 (an oversized encyclopedia with glaring factual errors) for the Macintosh, and you see that Microsoft thinks “bigger is better.” Look at Apple's emerging OpenDoc standard, and you see their commitment to the edited anthology. Books are upgraded (”all-new expanded third edition!”) much as software is. There are even books to teach programming and programs to teach writing. However, writing for a computer and writing for an audience are not entirely analogous procedures. A program is an active translator communicating natively with two readers (the computer and the user), whereas a novel is a static entity and a one-way conversation from author to reader. And, alas, there is not yet a toll-free tech support line for incomprehensible books.

Most of my fellow students marvel at a person who is proficient in both math and English, because they consider the two subjects to be fundamentally different and incompatible. Even those who excel in both consider themselves, by some coincidental confluence of disparate genes, to have roughly equal ability in each. I do not understand this view. I have always thought, even before I knew how to express it, that mathematics and writing were manifestations of the same internal process: converting logic to language. I enjoy engaging in that process, and I want to study computer science because its logic is of the highest rigor and its language is of the least ambiguity.

I haven't yet decided on a career, but I know that it will require continued studies in graduate school and that it will involve computers and writing. (I am also interested in studying mathematics, physics, and education.) At the interface between programming and writing there is a vast field of research waiting to be done, and of all the subjects that interest me, it is this connection that fascinates me most. I intend to study computer science and English in college for the purpose of determining just how far my introductory analogy can be drawn. Perhaps by understanding the structured rigidity of Pascal syntax I can arrive at a solution to the problem of ambiguity in English; more likely, I will find that the connecting road ends too soon for lack of pavement. I want to be the construction worker at the frontier.