Please explain why you want to be a member of the Global Engineering RAP at CU Boulder. Please include how you think this community will contribute to your training as an engineer and as a person and how you plan to contribute personally to the residential community: If offered the opportunity to join the Global Engineering RAP cohort at CU Boulder, I will share all of the talents that I uncover within myself while building friendships with all on our RAP floor. Knowing myself well, I am sure that their diverse backgrounds and study interests will inspire me to develop both personally and academically. Growing up in Moscow, I was lucky to have an international group of friends who enriched my life. From my American buddies, I've discovered how to be more outgoing, a discussion leader, industrious, innovative and optimistically-inclined. From my Russian druzhya, I have learned to view world affairs more sharp-mindedly, with a critical edge and to consult many sources not just the main stream ones. From my Turkish bestfriend, I have seen how being socially-engaged, a journalism enthusiast and a talented writer, is beneficial to attaining a deeply-enriched academic and personal experience. From my French-Canadian pal I've noted how a renowned economic professor's kid has emerged as a highly-inventive and strong athlete, leader, and organizer of social events—football games, gaming tournaments—all-the-most welcome when most needed to release stress. From my cousins in Belgrade I've learned to be more culturally connected and to sail. From my grandfather Vaso, a mechanical and civil engineer, I inherited level-headedness and mental strength in the face of adversity or hardship. At CU Boulder I will happily pass along all that I know, to create loyal friendships and build our special Global Engineering RAP bond.

I plan to become a third-generation engineer in my family, dedicated to building infrastructure systems that are affordable, energy-efficient and failproof. Below I provide an anecdote describing a very strong influence on my reasons for wishing to study engineering and kindly ask you to read on.

Ex-Yugoslavia produced more talented and resourceful engineers than it could lucratively employ. My grandfather and his brother, emanating from rural Serbia, were among them. Like others, they went abroad to undertake civil infrastructure projects. For decades these engineers lived far from family, alongside their personnel in the Middle East and North Africa—marshaling their “armies” intuitively across the developing world. My grandfather Vaso—a mechanical engineer, learned civil engineering on-the-go while building hospitals, universities, housing, roads, runways, and other essential infrastructure—becoming a true leader of industry.

One summer in Serbia, “Deda” Vaso brought me along to a meeting at the Belgrade Municipal Water Company. We toured the command center of the water supply system whose network spanned 8,700km. It is health monitored with Smart technology donated by Germany. Yet, its pipelines are comprised of eight different materials ranging from novel, flexible-PVC to wood. Noting this, I conjured up the wooden irrigation systems of ancient Mesopotamia and cringed... Yet when Deda heard “wooden pipes,” he smacked his forehead—overcome with the urgency of the water quality problems before us! Further, this dense urban center of two million, has no wastewater treatment facilities. The gazillion-dollar plants proposed by the Germans to Belgrade were purely science fiction.

I desire to learn to solve these problems. An open and globally-centered engineering curriculum would enable me to understand the infrastructure problems in cities and developing locales. Wishing to study materials science, water filtration, wastewater treatment, and energy-from-waste plant systems—I will focus my research on learning to design and build them affordably.

My grandfather "Deda Vaso" habitually solved such problems—whether doing so involved traveling to Beijing or Mumbai himself to study innovative, less-costly solutions. During his lifetime, project affordability was an integral concern—yet he figured it out. His distinctive talent was in creating his own manufacturing of essential components, by engaging a scrappy team of ex-Yugoslav engineers, architects, and workers. Deda would always say, “It’s easy to build if you’ve got a big budget, but we Serbs are poor, and we must be smarter!” At CU Boulder, I desire to learn to be a smart engineer, from a clean, technologically-innovative, materials-and-data-science-based, sustainability-focused approach.