Wien Sillevis Smitt

Helpful Organization North Of Regional Systems

I first heard of the University of Washington from my guitar and singing teacher when I
was a sophomore in high school. While I was vaguely aware of the school, I did not consider it a
school I would potentially go to until junior year. That said, I didn’t even start looking at schools
until halfway through junior year. I toured the school the start of my senior year and was
thoroughly impressed. I liked the atmosphere and the campus and it seemed like as good of a
school as any to apply to. The University of Washington was my third choice school; I didn’t
expect to get into Harvard and I didn’t want to go to Cornell, but UC Berkeley and Tufts were
my first and second choices. I got rejected from both.
When I was turning in my UW application, it asked me if I wanted to apply to
interdisciplinary honors. One of the first words that caught my eye was interdisciplinary.
Throughout high school, I took AP classes in a variety of subjects simply because I enjoyed the
topics. I loved physics and history but, as they are drastically different, I rarely found ways to
connect them. Interdisciplinary seemed to describe my attitude in learning, so I decided to apply.
I dedicated a lot of time to the Honors application because I wanted to give myself the
opportunity to study in an interdisciplinary setting. When I got into the honors program, it made
the University of Washington my favorite option for both academic and atmospheric reasons.
My immigrant background and my familial success was very influential in my journey to
get to UW. Like with the rest of my schooling, I was self-motivated during the college
application process. My identity as an immigrant is, for a large part, the source of my
self-motivation. Since my parents are from a foreign system of schooling, they were ill-equipped
to help me through college applications and could only help so much with homework during
high school. Despite this, their success and my family’s success has always driven me to perform
well in school, despite the fact that my family would love me unconditionally regardless of my
grades, degree, or future profession. As an immigrant, I constantly fought being seen as other
and worried that people would see my “failures” in the American school system as an argument
against my being their, which, while somewhat irrational, compelled me to do well.
At UW, I hope to explore the intersection of topics and to create a comprehensive
understanding of other areas of study using a diversity of ideas. I want to examine issues with
different lenses, whether they be historical, economic, or scientific. I want to use the honors
program to dive deeper into the connections between different subject areas and foster new
connections between topics that I am familiar with and others that I am not as familiar with.
More than anything, though, I want to be able to connect history and social issues to physics.

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