Harvard - B.S. in Mech. Engineering
Prompt: Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.
In one eager huff, I heaved the heavy-duty rope over my shoulder, raising the steel anchor from the lake's depths in preparation for our sailing journey to the world's best fried fish shack. My family's water adventure through the back-country lakes of Poland had charted its next course to Mikawiki's notorious floating fish shack that my cousin had been raving about for the last three days. With so much anticipation, I was devastated when I realized the wind was blowing in the opposite direction of our destination, hampering our plans for a fish frenzy feast. My cousin apprehended my sorrowful pace away from the dock. When I lamentingly pointed out that the wind was against us, he laughed, threw a hand over my shoulder, and turned me back toward the boat.
Dropping the sail to engage the wind, he began explaining how, by attaining a scissor formation with the sails, the air traveling through the first sail could generate a lift that propelled the second sail forward. Accordingly, my hands, perplexed by their counterintuitive instructions, maneuvered the nylon rope through the mast to point into the wind. As the ship accelerated, my craving for fried fish was replaced by a compulsion to grip the ropes tighter.
Back home, that same compulsion led me to making a fervid seven-mile bike ride to my school before the break of dawn each summer morning so I could build robots with my friends. Approaching the team's last year together, we wanted to push our efforts to the limit, which denoted late-night Solidworks CAD sessions and hours of scrupulously lathing one-inch shafts. My robot designs, consequently, required no paucity of ratchets, transmissions, or any other mystifying mechanisms. Pitching my inclination, as the Shark Tank project manager, towards a multivariable, angle-changing shooter mechanism, exhilarated by the complex yet beautiful functionality, we set off to design.
Seated at our once-smooth wooden bench, my teammate, Aiden, and I tirelessly designed CAD files large enough to be labeled "crash-worthy." "One more minute, please," I said every hour, meticulously tinkering until our coach kicked us out; we relocated to my humid achromatic garage for the night. Splitting into our specialties, I began prototyping my shooter mechanism. Egregious coefficients of friction from eleven shafts rendered impractical initial frameworks. The seventh iteration worked! Until the rack system sheared every gear. From the graveyard of scrapped shooters buried under our workbench, the eleventh, an amalgamation from hundreds more bike rides, fired game objects like a Gatling gun.
After endlessly building screw joints and drivetrains, my hands, calloused after seven years of robotics, longed to sail elsewhere. I applied for an internship at Innovation First International, founder of VEX Robotics. My first assignment was a straightforward STEM Education Demo: build a soccer robot capable of shooting tennis balls into velcro goals. The spacious desk beneath countless shelves piled with infinite materials outstripped my tiny, humid garage, offering limitless innovation. A ratchet intake here and maybe an angle-changing shooter there, I could already see the robot on the table. Not only was my imagination peaking, but its eventual bridge to educational use gave me purpose.
I bet the inventor of the sailboat, through a culmination of sleepless nights and zeal, didn't know his wonderment would be left with me millennia later. As I loaded my soccer robot into a truck for delivery, what struck me more than the culmination of my own sleepless hours was that I was now in the same boat as the inventor who had sent me careening down a path of engineering discovery. Engineering is defined not by a lineage of individual inventors but a collage of collaboration, innovation, and, most importantly, passion. Above the product of thousands of hours of curiosity and learning, I am, perhaps, most proud that a child may see the same fascination in a multivariable shooter as I saw in the sail of my cousin's boat.
