Harvard University

My most valuable possession is my pile of paper scraps. No, not scraps made from fancy floral cardstock, but scraps ripped from simple blank pieces of copy paper. Products of quixotic brainstorms and treasures of endless pen ink enclosed in nothing more than a flimsy Whole Foods paper bag sitting under my whiteboard of messy doodles and chemistry equations. Utilizing the boundless potential of their blank space, I would scribble my mind, which was constantly punctured by endless streams of ideas I knew would escape if not written down. Although seemingly useless at first glance, these scraps…