"I should talk now about Phaedrus' knife. It'll help understand some of the things we talked about. The application of this knife, the division of the world into parts and the building of this structure, is something everybody does...Once we have the handful of sand, the world of which we are conscious, a process of discrimination goes to work on it. This is the knife. We divide the sand into parts... The handful of sand looks uniform at first, but the longer we look at it the more diverse we find it to be...It just goes on and on" (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, pg 97). There are two kinds of people in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, those that are classical thinkers, and those that are romantic thinkers. The understanding that these are two different types of people is ultimately what is most important to finding Quality in your life. Phaedrus, who is Persig's - the author's- evil ghost and old consciousness, was someone completely obsessed with rationality. He was extremely smart and sought to understand the underlying reasoning behind everything. To do so, he created an analytical knife. Phaedrus was in pursuit of the ghost of rationality, or the Truth. He approached this task with his classical mind and his classical knife. He needed to cut everything in order to find a truth that he would believe. This task was paradoxical due to the fact that there's two kinds of people. He was doomed to fail from the start. He was using his classical ideas to try and understand romantic people. This could not work due to the nature of this distinction. Classical people cannot understand romantic people through a classical lens. The only way Phaedrus would've succeeded was if everyone thought just like him, if everyone used their analytical knife in the same way. By the end of the book, Phaedrus returns. The search for rationality broke Persig. The need to clearly define every aspect of the world was such an impossible task and Phaedrus never understood that. The very idea of claiming there are two types of people while trying to define both with one way of thinking hints to the fact that it was never going to work. Many in the world don’t see this. They think that if only everyone saw the world as they do, everything would be fine. Phaedrus thought this too. If everyone thought like him, we’d all be mad. The Western idea of “hierarchy” is brought up throughout the book and it even applies to the way Persig and Phaedrus talk about classical and romantic thinkers. Romantic thinkers tend to take the world at face value, not really caring how it happened, just that it did happen. Classical thinkers on the other hand, need to know the “how”. While it is stated that both are valid ways of living, the romantic way of life is always talked about with a hint of negativity towards it. This is due to the hierarchical structure that Phaedrus applies to the world. Classical thinking always had more behind it, more to think about and learn. He sees classical thinking as the superior mindset and therefore will never attach the true value to the romantic way of life. This goes back to his knife. He is trying to use classical methods to understand romantic people. There is a very obvious irony here that he was never able to get over. The second half of the book spends most of its time discussing the topic of Quality with a capital "Q". The capitalization is important, in this context it implies that there is one true Quality. Persig believes that having Quality in one's life is the key to happiness. Quality never gain a definition in this book. Instead, yet living without it is akin to living without meaning. Persig finds Quality in working on his motorcycle and thinks that his friends that don't have the same interests are missing a Quality experience. This goes back to the idea that there are two kinds of people. Persig and Phaedrus both want people to see the world as they do to achieve this happiness. It is true that a lack of Quality leads to a meaningless life, however there is not one way to achieve that Quality. One book cannot tell a person how exactly to improve their life. Individuals must make the effort to find their own Quality and understand how they see the world.

One of my earliest memories is of me helping my dad put plaster over the nails in the drywall of a house he was working on. I dropped some of the mud on my brown boots. I no longer have those boots but I still have the same interest in building. Throughout my childhood, you could always find me with legos in hand or building fairy houses at recess. Once I started middle school, that interest grew into building robots for the school's robotics team. Many late nights, calluses, and competitions later, I became the captain of the high school team. I'm now going to school for electrical engineering. That love for getting my hands dirty never really left. It's what makes me, me. Going to college gives me the chance to explore my interests and learn as much as I want. My parents both emigrated from Lebanon because of the chances this country gave them. Growing up, I was very aware of this. My dad never had the opportunity to go to college so he worked hard to make sure I could. Both of my parents have been very supportive of my interests, whether it's playing violin for my school's production of Beauty and the Beast, winning Gold Keys for the Scholastic Art and Writing Competition, or going to Houston, TX. for the World Championships for the FIRST Robotics Competition. I worked very hard to make sure everything I did in high school had meaning and taught me something. I enjoyed all of my extracurriculars while being able to set myself up to be successful in the future. I learned many valuable things from each activity and met great people through them. Though they're not all engineering related, I believe it's important to have a variety of interests. This scholarship wouldn't only help me study engineering, it would help me be able to continue my other interests, like art and orchestra, which in turn creates a better engineer. I'm a very big advocate of doing whatever interests you. I know people that could solve any math problem you put in front of them, and that might be fun for them, but it's proven that creating art and playing music works different areas of the brain that a physics lecture simply can't do. I think many people forget that in college and in general. Humans need to create and if you have creative engineers you get creative solutions which is exactly what the world needs now. I graduated with high honors and have taken many AP tests but one of the first things I did when creating my college schedule was make sure I could take orchestra and my sketchbook is at the top of my packing list. That's what's so great about college, you can focus on things that make you happy, things that make you excited to be an adult.