She spent a week preparing the application.

Her essay described our leaking kitchen faucet and the water-quality monitoring device she hoped to invent.

She showed me the first draft.

It was full of large statements about saving the world.

I suggested she begin with a scene that mattered to her.

“What scene?” she asked.

“Something real.”

She thought for a while, then wrote about taking apart our old water filter at the kitchen table, trying to understand why the replacement cartridges cost so much.