Tell us about yourself in 500 words or less. State your name and where you were born.

Include some personal details and tell the judges why you deserve and want to become a
Sterling Scholar.
My name is Tarun Sunkaraneni. I was born to a lower middle class family in a rural town in
India called Khamman. My parents had a very "nomadic" lifestyle because of job
insecurities. As a consequence, I grew up attending many schools and never had the chance
to make friends with whom I'd have long term relations with. I had a lot of time studying
science and math instead of devoting to friends. I first moved to America in 4th grade and
was subject to a lot of bullying for being "fresh off the boat" and fat. As I felt more and
more unacceptable in an American elementary school, I spent less time trying to fit in and
impress the other kids and more time reading textbooks and doing math with my parents.
Moving schools often and unexpectedly between the countries put a lot of stress on me and
I had to constantly learn to adapt to the situation quickly, only to move schools yet again.
The problem was that education in India was very focused on math and science while
placing very little emphasis on language arts and elective classes, whereas the vice versa
felt true in America. Because of that structure and the fact that I switched between them
many times, I have found it very difficult to assimilate into Language Arts education, and
this disability still haunts me.
I think I deserve to be the Sterling scholar for math because of the proficiency in Math ive
demonstrated since my childhood. Ive qualified to attend the state AMC for three years in a
row, and I have showed skill in higher level math the last four years of high school. In 11th
grade I was nominated by Professor Ray Barton from the University of Utah to be Calculus
1210 and 1220 student of the year, in a class of 50 students. Because of that award I
decided to go even further into math by taking classes at the University, even though I
didn't need any more math credits. I also think I deserve to be the Math sterling scholar
because of the hours I have spent teaching the subject: refugees who desperately needed
tutoring but had no financial capability to hire someone, friends and peers attending my
high school, and even college students who are in their middle twenties. I have experience
in the category, and I want to help people by applying it into engineering research. I have
been using and will use math for rest of my life to hopefully make an impact in the world.

Choose one of the activities, honors or awards, describe it briefly and explain why it was
meaningful to you. What did you learn and what did you accomplish?
Please limit your response to 3000 characters (approx. 500 words) or less.
I started helping out the kids at Southpark apartments located in South Salt Lake through
the organization Utah G.A.R.D.E.N.S. Inc., through which I was able to grow and donate
pesticide free food. Because of the growing body and increasing influence of the group, we
expanded from donating food and started contributing hours helping the refugee kids get
the necessary help to integrate properly into the American education system. Being the
student with the most math education in the organization, I chose to help kids with math
homework and education.
In the beginning I would often get frustrated because often some of the kids would lack
basic, fundamental, and unexplainable mathematical knowledge. I would be dumbfounded
at rather basic and inexplicable questions such as why multiplying two negative numbers
gives a positive result, or why the Pythagorean theorem only works with a right triangle.
Even though the first few weeks of teaching were rough, I gradually started developing
more and more tolerance and made sure I never showed any apathy towards these
children. As a few weeks had progressed it became more and more easy for me to teach
these kids, and I started seeing improvement in their opinion of the subject. At often times
I would have to sacrifice time during the weekend devoted to friends or homework to help
these kids out. My goal had been to make sure that their test scores improved and to create
interest in math to the students.
This was a very meaningful experience to me because it made me value the difficulty in
teaching math. Even though I also taught science to these kids, it was much harder to teach
math. Teaching math was much harder than science because in almost all cases, a scientific
principle could be shown in real life whereas basic math ideas, such as the distributive
property, could be impossible to show through an experimentation. The abstractness of
math made it very difficult for some of these concepts to be conveyed from me to the
students. It is because of this experience I clearly understood that the most basic of things
could often be the hardest to explain. It is analogous to explaining what words are:
combinations of letters to create sounds which represent an object or idea, whereas
explaining what an individual letter itself can be very difficult.
After many weeks of tutoring the kids started showing a sharp increase in interest and their
test scores went up, also teaching me that the beginning of learning anything can be very
hard and scary to do alone, but with a good foundation can come a lifelong interest and
advancement in the field.

Choose one of the activities, honors or awards that relate to the Community Service/
Citizenship qualification and describe it briefly.
Please limit your response to 500 words or less.

The Indian community center located in the Sri Ganesha Hindu Temple in South Jordan is
the primary cultural center point of the Hindu and Indian people in the Salt Lake Valley
amounting to 3000 people. The community center is not only the main place of worship for
the Hindus in the Valley but the center also offers cultural Indian dancing, singing,
instrumental, language and other elective classes for free on the weekends for kids and
adults of all ages. As a result of its significance, the place is always busy and always could
use volunteers. Because of the growing involvement of the community, the temple staff
desperately needed to volunteer. Working to keep the building functioning required me to
distribute food, cashier, set equipment for events, manage events, and clean the building
regularly.
Being part of a very small minority population, getting involved in my community and
regularly seeing more of my kind created a greater sense of belonging. Because of the
stronger sense of belonging, I also started taking interest in helping decide what went on
and planning future events. Because of the Interest in the direction of the temple was
heading, I started investing in the success of the community by providing initiatives for the
center to provide more free classes. I was part of the initiative to help the temple provide
sports event for free to the youth. Because of the success of those programs, it only
created more need for me to want to help out the building however I could.
Being a resident of Utah where one's religion is often an important factor in deciding the
most trivial of facts such as who gets to be friends with who, I would find myself frustrated
about the way I was born and why I was always the odd one out. These frustrations would
often cause me to not want to go to school as I thought school would only make me feel
lonelier. However, after getting involved at the I.C.C., my sense of belonging somewhere
returned to me.
I have found involvement to be the perfect antidote to feeling like you dont belong in a
place. It is said that giving back to my community not only helps the community, but also
helps ground us with a sense of purpose and belonging. I didnt understand the relation
between volunteering and the sense of belonging, but after helping out for so long, it made
me who I am and is a major reason my heritage has been preserved for many years after
moving to America, and I hope to pass down that exact heritage for generations to come.

Describe two or three unique things about yourself and relate them to your category. If
possible, include challenges you have overcome and describe any distinctive experiences
that have affected you.
Please limit your response to 500 words or less.
Quick grasping and persistent: Having attended many schools in India and the U.S. I have
learned to cope with many different situations and many different teaching methods. This
also has made me knowledgeable in many different areas. I always try to map concepts
with applications in real life and try to visualize equations and principles in everyday world.
As a consequence, I often ask a lot of questions and contribute a lot to a discussion. It is
also because of this quality that I am able to try to solve a math problem, no matter how
hard, through many methods. Another consequence is that I am able to stay interested in a
problem for a long time and am able to spend even hours trying to solve one problem. In
my Calculus 3 class at the University of Utah I spent almost two and a half hours trying to
do one extra credit proof and worked out many ways to derive the same proof before I
turned it in. Because of this quality, I think I am unique and have done so well in the math
classes I have enrolled in.
Tutor: I have taught an equivalent of almost 300 hours just in math, from kids who cannot
speak English well to Juniors in college who are in their middle twenties. As a result, my
math education has felt very complete because teaching at various levels has ensured that I
have not forgotten specific concepts from each year of mathematics. Teaching math has
also helped me connect ideas from different years to see how everything is related and this
understanding has made math less memorization and more so application of logic.

How do you think your involvement in this category will enrich your life?
Please limit your response to 500 words or less.
It was amazing to learn how mathematical ideas fit into fundamental scientific concepts.
Math lies in biology through integrals relating the cell membrane surface area and ability to
transport molecules, through derivatives in rate of diffusion, through probability in
genetics, and through permutations in the structure of proteins. Through logarithmic
decays in half-life and differential equations in rate law reactions. Through vectors of forces
and Riemann sums of Electric flux. I think that people often lose interest in learning math
because of the loss in relevance to their world. It is understandable to wonder why one
would ever use an inverse trigonometric function in their life after graduation. However,
such thinking is missing the point of mathematics. The point of math is to build logic skills
and problem solving strategies. One may never integrate a function in your job, but because
learning the process, that person has trained him/herself to problem solve. Problem solving
is also very relevant to Engineering because Engineering is application of science to solve
problems in the world. As science encompasses engineering, so does math encompass
science. Therefore, math is like the grandfather of engineering. The application of math is
what engineering principles and concepts essentially are.
Once it is realized that Engineering is all about constructing, manipulating, and reasoning, it
becomes clear that an important prerequisite for completing a task is an ability to handle
abstract thoughts. Now that is something that humans have been doing successfully for
over thousands of years in the form of mathematics.
Engineers have to build, design, and reason in an abstract manner. Some everyday
examples requiring such thinking include computer programs, creating equipment and
machinery, and coming up with the questions, and performing experiments to answer those
questions. Abstract thinking challenges the mind to think in the outside the box manner,
and such thinking only comes from learning math.
Math quantifies all science. Some engineers may never apply any of the specific theorems
or principles they were forced to learn as students. But that doesnt mean that those
mathematical ideas were not important. The main benefit of learning and doing
mathematics, is not the coursework; rather its the fact that it develops the ability to reason
analytically. I have loved and understood the value of math my whole life, and I anticipate
on using it every day of my life as I try to solve problems in the engineering world.