University applications, rice, and 1 year of algae vlogs

Aliyan's Newsletter - October 2024

Hi! Welcome to my October newsletter! If you’re a returning reader, welcome back. If you’re new to my newsletter, I’m Aliyan, a 16-year-old from the somehow both warm and cold city of Ottawa, Canada. I'm passionate about climate change, emerging technologies, and building projects like writing research papers on carbon capture and growing algae in my basement! What you’ll find here is a chronicle of cool things I’ve done this month, lessons I’ve learned, and anything else I find interesting!

This month, I immersed myself in university applications, started new experiments, and celebrated 1 year of my Experimenting with Microalgae video series!

If you were forwarded this email, you’re a friend or mentor of mine and I wanted to share my journey with you! Subscribe here to receive these updates every month!

University applications

I’m officially two months into Grade 12 and that means that university applications are starting to ramp up. In the past two months, I’ve been immersed in a bunch of applications, including the Morehead-Cain Scholarship, the University of Oxford and Early Action for MIT. It’s taken a lot of work and many revisions, but I’ve also learned a lot from the process.

By far my biggest lesson is the importance of good organization. Most applications have many different parts, from traditional essay questions, to reference letters, to live video responses. Keeping track of all of these is really important to ensure nothing gets left behind (even if it requires a 35-page Google Doc - see below!)

My MIT document required 35 pages to keep track of it all!

I’ve also learned the importance, and sometimes the challenge, of presenting my projects in the best possible way. Many universities have a holistic application that looks not only at grades but extracurriculars and projects outside of school. In my case, my basement experiments were fairly technical, and explaining these succinctly, without assuming any prior knowledge required many revisions and creative writing. Big thanks to my parents for helping a ton with the editing and review process for my many applications!

Starting experiments with UltraRice

After nearly 2 months of working head-down on university applications, I realized how much I missed doing experiments in my basement lab. Fortunately, I had a whole series of experiments queued up for UltraRice. UltraRice is a non-profit combatting malnutrition in India with ultrasonically fortified rice and, as their first wet lab developer, I’m using my basement lab to optimize their process.

This project has been a long time coming (I think I first mentioned it in my July Newsletter), but I’ve finally been able to get all the supplies and chemicals I need. Now that everything is here, I’ll first be setting up a process to analyze the nutrients in rice, then attempting to fortify the rice by essentially blasting them with sound waves, and then measuring the nutrients the rice gain.

I’ve started on that first step in the past few days and made this deep red solution, which allows me to quantify the amount of iron, a vital nutrient, that the rice absorb!

Nothing beats basement chemistry!

A whole year of microalgae vlogs

Last October, I published my first video in my “Experimenting with Microalgae” series. Little did I know how much the series would grow.

Since then, I’ve published vlogs every single week for an entire year and it’s been quite the ride. I’ve built an entire lab in my basement, won two national competitions, and filmed everywhere from Switzerland to Newfoundland. I celebrated by putting together a montage of some of the best moments from my year’s worth of vlogs in my one-year special.

I learned a lot from the past year as well, and I’m excited to take the vlogs to new heights for another year of new projects and experiments! If you’re not already subscribed on YouTube or following on LinkedIn, be sure to do so to stay up to date.

Looking ahead

This month, I’m looking forward to starting some new projects. I’ll be continuing the experiments with UltraRice and diving into mitigating the effects of algae blooms, an ecological phenomenon in which algae actually harm the environment. I’m also working with a team for the Shape the Future Challenge, which focuses on the future of food, specifically alternative protein sources. I’ll have lots to share about all of this in next month’s newsletter.

But that’s all for now, so thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this and want to keep up with what I’m doing, subscribe below to receive these newsletters every month.