Soumik’s relationship with space was not limited to an interest in rockets or astronomy and was visible in the way he worked through ideas. The more important development came when his questions became smaller: landing-leg geometry, material optimization, propulsion and particle detection.
With Collegify, a long-standing fascination with space became a more rigorous direction in Aerospace Engineering.
By Collegify · Student journey
Student
Soumik Agarwala
University
University of Michigan
Admission year
2025
Soumik’s interest in space was never difficult to spot. What mattered was the way he engaged with it.
A space settlement first asked him to imagine at scale. Mathematics taught him to optimize. Research directed him to narrow the problem further still: to the geometry of a rocket’s landing legs, the energy absorbed on impact, or the way a particle might be detected.
Somewhere along that progression, space stopped being only a subject that fascinated him, it became an engineering problem he wanted to understand.
From imagining systems to engineering them
Soumik’s early work in the Space Settlement Design Competition gave that interest its first serious structure. He began on the structural design of a low-Earth-orbit transit settlement. At the Asian round, he moved into operational engineering, leading work around systems including atmosphere, waste management and food production for a proposed lunar-orbit settlement.
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His team won the Asian round and advanced to the international competition at Kennedy Space Center, where Soumik later led operational engineering for a lunar-base proposal.
The scale was ambitious. But the more important development was intellectual.
The questions became more precise
By the time Soumik was building his undergraduate profile with Collegify, there was already substantial evidence of his interest in aerospace.
The task was not to add a manufactured “space theme”, it was to make the depth visible.
Mathematics became one route - For which, Soumik used calculus to model a torus and explore how material use could be optimised for a hypothetical space settlement. Outside class, he used tools such as GeoGebra to demonstrate concepts including Kepler’s laws, while further study took him into orbital mechanics, launch-fuel calculations and rocket-engine trade-offs.
Then came research - Under the guidance of an aerospace-engineering researcher, Soumik studied landing-leg architectures for reusable launch vehicles. He analyzed data from more than 120 rocket landings, comparing different geometries for stability and impact absorption and checking the findings against published flight information.
The problem was far smaller than designing a lunar settlement, the thinking was more exact.
Depth, not decoration
A separate CERN Beamline for Schools proposal took Soumik into particle detection. He proposed a quartz-based hodoscope using Cherenkov radiation as an alternative approach to conventional scintillators; the work was later published in his school journal.
At NEST, his school’s science and technology society, his role also evolved from participation to leadership. He directed the Astronomy Wing, developed aerospace exhibitions and workshops, and mentored younger teams preparing for competitions.
Later, through Into The Universe, he began translating complex aerospace ideas into simpler explainers, quizzes and digital content.
These experiences were different in form, but increasingly consistent in direction.
At Collegify, the emphasis was on preserving that progression rather than reducing Soumik to another student who could simply say he was “passionate about space”, and the evidence was already stronger than the claim.
Where the profile arrived
Soumik applying to study Aerospace Engineering.
What made that choice credible is not one competition, a research paper or one leadership position, it's the progression across them.
He moved from conceptualizing large-scale space settlements to examining the mathematics inside their design; from studying rockets broadly to investigating one component of a reusable launch vehicle; and from learning aerospace concepts himself to helping younger students understand them.
The scale of the questions changed. The direction did not.
Soumik began with an interest in what might be possible beyond Earth, and with Collegify his work increasingly focused on the harder question that follows: how do you engineer it well enough to make it possible?
This case study describes one student’s experience, published with supporting evidence and permission. Individual outcomes are not typical or guaranteed; admissions decisions rest with each university.
