Coming from an engineer I have a couple suggestions.

1. Adjectives like "old school" do not belong in a technical paper, essay, or any other writing. (Used when talking about the game boy.)

2. You spend a paragraph and a half talking about your background. Background is good for an essay, but cut it down to a short paragraph. Engineers need to learn to write short and information dense. In the future your manager/adviser may read more than a couple sentences of what you write, so you need to get the information across as quick as possible. You are right that less is more in this case, but you need to appeal to the reader as well.

3. Spend more time with your ambitions, your 5, 10, 20 year plans. For example, I would highlight that I am working on my PhD, one reason for that is to "give back" and hopefully help people younger than me learn something that interests them.

4. Also it asks for your strengths and weaknesses, you did not talk about that other than in the background. DO NOT ignore weaknesses, but make your weaknesses into strengths. EX. I am not always organized, but I have been keeping a day planner, and plan out all my classes, hopework, and other activities in order to maintain time for everything. That example is more like for a job interview, but the same concept applies when writing.

5. Finally sneak in how the money will be useful to you, without asking for money. If that makes sense to you. This is important to do whenever money is on the line. Whether writing for an essay, or writing a grant proposal, or whatever else.

These are just my suggestions, do not feel that I am knocking your essay in any way. With some grammatical checking I think it will be fine, but these are just some suggestions that may help you improve the essay a little, and hopefully give you the edge.