The City College of New York

189 Loop Drive

Sayville, NY 11782

 

February 17, 2022

 

The City College of New York

160 Convent Avenue

New York, NY 10031

 

Attention: Professor Jacobson

Subject: Letter of Introduction

 

Dear Professor Jacobson:

 

My name is Samantha Kohn; I grew up in a military family, so I never stayed in one place long. I have lived in 11 different homes in 10 different cities in Georgia, Texas, Ohio, Alaska, Tennessee, and New York. I had attended 10 different schools prior to high school graduation, and I have also attended two different colleges so far as I am a transfer student from Stony Brook University. This has made me into a very adaptable person, which has become one of my best traits.

I have a lot of different interests in my life from applicable skills to hobbies. I love music and the arts. I play several different instruments such as violin, bass guitar, guitar, piano, and ukulele. I have also been in art exhibitions at LIU and the Heckscher Museum of Art. I own a 1995 Suzuki Savage LS650. I can take the whole motorcycle apart and put it back together and it’s one of my favorite pastimes. I do renovation in my house and have a love for carpentry. My past times have always reflected my love for understanding how things work and engineering solutions to everyday problems.

When it comes to my academic achievements, I did well in high school; I had a 4.0 GPA and participated in several sports and other extracurricular activities. I got into Stony Brook University after high school, but I struggled during my first semester there. I received a D in a calculus-based Classical Physics course, but I retook it and got an A, and in all my other classes I took there I received A’s and B’s.

I transferred to CCNY this spring semester and it has been one of the most difficult things I have ever done. I had never traveled alone to New York City before. I live on Long Island now, and I have a little bit longer than a two-hour commute to my classes Tuesdays and Thursdays. I have ADHD and struggle with anxiety, so being alone and having to pay attention to train times and subways and delays and navigating around an area I had never been before was not an easy task for me. I honestly think one of my biggest personal achievements was getting to this class early on my first day.

When it comes to my future place in the world of engineering, I want to be involved with environmental engineering. I want to be a part of a global effort of contributing to this world more than we take and I think there is beauty in that concept. I am a Civil Engineering major specializing in Environmental Engineering. This connects to my professional goals because it gives me the ability to have a direct impact on environmental problems by engineering solutions and prevent more from happening. I think having the ability to make a physical impact is the most important part of being an engineer.

I personally find making environmental solutions by fixing infrastructure that we already have very interesting. For example, in my first civil engineering class, we had learned about the Louisiana wetlands and how engineers had built levees to remove the water in New Orleans and similar areas so that civil infrastructure could be developed there. The problem with this, however, is it stopped the flow of nutrients and water to Louisiana’s wetlands and in doing so has caused them to shrink significantly over the years. Since they have reduced so much, cities like New Orleans face storm surges head-on causing immense damage. More levees and floodwalls were built to counteract this, however, when Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana, there were over 50 failures of levees and floodwalls that protected New Orleans and the surrounding areas and caused severe damage and killed over 1,800 people. This is a great example of what I would like to play a part in: fixing issues by renovating the infrastructure we have in order to reduce environmental impact. In this case, restoring Louisiana wetlands is a good start to a long list of solutions that need to be enacted. So, my major is a great fit for this professional goal of mine because it enables me to fix solutions to problems like this that require having a good understanding of civil engineering and environmental engineering.

 

Sincerely,

Samantha Kohn