Curiosity, Research, and SoftCom by Bo Ming

Curiosity, Research, and SoftCom by Bo Ming - October 2026 Scholarship Essay

A SoftCom Lab research question pulled me past contest problems into open ones: how do you turn a confusing student money decision into a next step someone will actually take? That question deepened when I started building Finly and Finly Bot as clarity tools for classmates who freeze halfway through aid letters and refund timelines.

Competitive programming at the USACO Gold level taught me to break hard cases into pieces that compile. SoftCom forced a harder test: do the pieces help a real first-generation peer at midnight, or do they only impress people who already know the dialect? I am a first-generation U.S. citizen starting at Brandeis University in Fall 2026, undeclared with intended Politics, Philosophy, and Economics, college GPA 4.0 with all As in progress. Home is Irvine, California; campus is Waltham, Massachusetts. Pell-eligible with a self-reported SAI of −1500. Those facts are why finishability is not an abstract UX slogan for me.

The experiment was iterative and local. I drafted plain-language next steps for opaque campus money decisions, asked stuck peers where the wording still failed, and revised. Finwise peer service became the human loop of the same SoftCom habit: treat confusion as a design failure, not personal shame. An EY Sustainability internship raised the bar on documentation and tradeoffs under deadlines—the professional version of writing something that survives contact with reality.

What deepened my understanding is that student-facing systems fail open toward the people with the least prior knowledge. Tech can punish attention or protect it. SoftCom is how I practice protecting it: clearer defaults, honest labels, one next action. PPE is how I want to study the incentives behind those systems—who benefits when forms stay confusing, and who pays. SAT 1560 and USACO Gold show I can handle technical depth; they do not invent a finished company or a declared major I have not claimed.

This scholarship would cover a small slice of educational costs while I keep studying and shipping SoftCom tools that make opaque systems finishable. The curiosity remains practical: clarity compounds; jargon does not.