Tag: childhood

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amanda quotes

Amanda’s Family & Childhood

[2-6] So I am from [European country]. Then I wanted to come to the U.S. to start playing soccer at the same time, in high school in [European country]you can choose what track you want to do, if you want to more towards engineering or economics and stuff, so I chose to do engineering because I like math. And then when I got here, I got into to school mostly because of the soccer team and I just wanted to do something that was involving math because I kind of like to think.

[14-16] I looked what kind of courses every track offered, and that’s why I chose to do the engineering part, because it’s more like calculations and stuff, and that was the courses I liked in elementary school.

[22-25] Yeah, like my whole family, they are kinda interested and good at more like the math part than like, drawing and stuff. So then I think I was able to get a lot of help from home, and therefore, I kinda got good at math and I think you start to like stuff that you’re good at.

[71-77] I think it’s just probably moving this far and not having family close makes it more self independent. Of course, I have developed my English skills enough, but it’s like a deeper personal experience and development than if I had just stayed home and studied. You feel like you’re moving away from all the safety you had, like you don’t know anyone and figure out everything myself. From living at home and having your parents there to support you to not having them. It has developed me a lot as a person. I think it’s worth it. I want to try new things I think it just makes me grow.

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josh quotes

Josh’s Family & Childhood

[11-15] I come from a middle class family, and I’m an only child. My father went to vocational school for construction, sprinkler fitting, and that was the maximum amount of education he had. My mother went to college. She’s a nurse, and she recently got her master’s. I have a big family; I have some people who have gone to college and some people who haven’t.

[101-112] My parents never really told me what to do. They were always kind of in the mindset of, “Do what you want, do what makes you happy, we’ll support you.” Whatever I decide is fine, so I never really had a reason to go anywhere because of them. I think from the beginning, my mind was pretty set on a science field so it didn’t take a lot of encouragement to pursue that.

[19-24] When I was in middle school, I changed my desires to reflect more programming and computer based design, I was looking at game design and stuff like that. It wasn’t until I got in high school and I started taking the programming courses that I decided to go to computer science. And then when it came down to time to choose my major, I had gotten sick of the programming but I still liked the problem solving and working hands on.

[101-112] One big influence that I did have was my cousin. The way high school in my district worked was when you pick your classes for your freshman year of high school, you decide whether or not you want to go to the vocational school half day and then, after that first year, you can decide to go full day or still half day. My cousin, who is three or four years older than me, went to the same district I did. He went to the vocational school for computer design. He originally wanted to be a roller coaster engineer and I remember growing up and seeing all the things he was doing and I was like, “That’s really cool.”

[115-121] So, he was definitely one of the people who got me interested in the computer aided part of engineering, and he’s definitely the one who I think got me really interested in the design aspect and kept me centralized around that area. But otherwise, it wasn’t really people telling me to go here or go there. I had this idea from the get go and people would kind of just positively reinforce. If they asked what I wanted to do, I’d say engineering or computer science and they’d be like, “That’s a good profession.” Or, “I think you’d succeed there.” Or something like that.

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joy quotes

Joy’s Childhood and Family

[3-4; 5-8; 18-24; 49-50; 58-59; 67-68] So my mom is a teacher and I was originally going to be public schooled, but at the age of four I asked my mom to teach me how to read. So, she ended up teaching me how to read and then one thing led to another and then I was homeschooled from kindergarten through high school. When I first became interested in engineering when I was younger, I would help my dad with projects around the house and enjoyed hands on learning. I was in sports from age 10 through 14 and then at 14 I joined robotics and was in that all the time. And then in high school I joined a robotics team, a FIRST Robotics Team. I learned about FIRST Robotics through one of my homeschool friend’s mom. She was heavily involved in it as a volunteer. I joined because my best friend was also on the team.

[74-80] I started out of on the woodworking team because I knew that I wanted to do hands on things but working with wood is more forgivable and safer than working with metal. And it is not as expensive either. They had me working with things like drills, hand tools, calipers, and tape measurers. After my first year, I switched over to the mechanical sub-team where I was working on CNC machinery and metal, steel, acrylics, and Polycarp net.

[97-121] When it was time to apply for colleges, I visited a ‘midwestern university’. Originally, I said, “No, this is too expensive, and their engineering program is not what I want. I want something more like another ‘midwestern university’.” Then, I visited a few other smaller schools, but I chose my current ‘midwestern university’ based on a price comparison between the two schools. I believe that the other ‘midwestern university’ would have made the best mechanical engineer or environmental engineer, but I wanted to a general engineering degree and to be close to my family. Also, the professor to student ratio is 1:20. The professors are willing to help outside of class and get to know you on a personal level. I also found that their graduates actually get jobs.

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lauren quotes

Lauren’s Childhood & Family

[6-7; 23-24; 31-37; 69-75] I’ve grown up in ‘southern region’ for the grand majority of my life. I lived six weeks in ‘rocky mountain region’, but then my family moved to ‘southern region.’ My high school is right next to the local ‘southern region college’. Yeah, I had to test to get into my high school. They took our state testing results. You had to have a certain grade to get into the school, but the school was a public school. You just had to maintain a couple of other things, like you had to get a hundred service hours throughout high school, take multiple AP classes. When we did classwork and stuff, it was kind of silly, but we had to write “always my best” on the top. Everyone kind of laughed at that. They did push you to try and do really good.

[46-48; 56-58] Throughout my four years of high school, I took human geography, psychology, environmental sciences , US history, German, bio, government and macroeconomics. I also took four years of my high school’s engineering classes such as 3D modeling and mechanics. My first engineering class involved drawing a lot of diagrams, which I didn’t enjoy, but the second year we did a lot of CAD work, Computer Aided Design, and I really loved working with that. During the third year of high school, we talked about springs and motiwon and linear motion and stuff like that and we built some things. My friend and I tried to build a grabber arm for an arcade machine out of cardboard and duct tape and pneumatics. It didn’t work the best, but we were the cheapest budget.

[75; 91-92; 95-99] Then, during senior year, it was all about my senior thesis. We chose to design a cleaning device for wheelchairs because one of my best friends in ‘southern region’ is wheelchair-bound. So, I’d been out at dinner with him and he went to go wash his hands before food. When he came out of the restroom, his hands were dirty again. There had been something on the floor that got onto him, so I mentioned it to my ‘team partner’ when we were brainstorming ideas for our project and we were like, “Wow, let’s see if we can do something to help that.”. As a result, we designed the device to clean the hand rims as you rolled the wheelchair around.

[77-84; 64-67] My ‘Team partner’ and I spent a lot of time on the design project. We had three hours in class every week to work on the project and outside of class, me and her would meet up for around seven hours on the weekend to work on it and sometimes we met after class too. We used the ‘southern region college’ to 3D print parts for us. We would sand the parts down and make them cleaner and then assemble them together. We had to write a paper to go with the project and we wrote more than anyone else in the class had written, which we didn’t need to do, but we felt everything was important. We stood in the gym for a while and professional engineers and other professionals came through and listened to our spiel about the product. We had a prototype and we had a really cool bulletin board. I’m still really proud of that project. I really enjoyed the senior, engineering project, so I decided I would try and go into that for my life.

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quotes tchuck

Tchuck’s Family & Childhood

[91-94; 96-98] My dad is an engineer, so I was from that young age I had that influence over me, I still do. So that was a big part. So I’m the oldest of four, so I have three other siblings. So I felt like there’s always that pressure to succeed, do well in school and all that stuff. […] I like knowing how things work and all that generic stuff. So yeah I’d say it’s a mix between. I do want to do it and I do like it, but I think also a big part of it was also my dad.

[9-11; 28-30; 38-44] …in terms of my academics at least, I always try very hard. I’ve always taken the hardest classes. I was in STEM Academy for my high school… it was everyone that was looking for majors involving science, technology, engineering and math and all that types of stuff, basically you get put in a cohort, to an extent. There was specific trips we were able to go on since we were in the STEM academy. The biggest thing, […] was an agreement they had with […] a local community college, and I got to transfer out, 16 college credits. I just picked whatever class I had, and if I got an A or B in them for the transfer credit I was able to do that, so I got to bring in those into [East coast university].

[58-62; 66-68; 70-72] they just introduced it in my senior year, an engineering class. So obviously I took it, because I was like, “You know, why not? Maybe it will be relevant, maybe it will be interesting.” So I took it, it was all right. It was mostly based on mechanical engineering which like, I’m biomedical engineering, so it’s still useful, I suppose, but I am not as interested in it. It was a good class. We watched […an] open-heart surgery, we got to watch that. So that was kind of interesting to watch. […]. I remember watching it and I found it pretty interesting, cause like I don’t know, I think that stuff is interesting, I don’t care about the blood or anything like that.

[76-78] So, the only thing I didn’t like about [the STEM Academy was], I don’t get to into it, but today nowadays they stress the women in engineering thing, I don’t have a problem with that, except then they have the trips only for women in engineering so I couldn’t even go.

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anna quotes

Anna’s Family & Childhood

[16-22; 23-26] From kindergarten until middle school I went an alternative school which had 40 kids in it total,  grouped by rough age groups and the school was project-based learning so instead of sitting down teaching us ABCs, numbers, counting, they gave us a project, assembled us into rough groups of kids of different ages and told us to go. It was very loose, not formal at all. I didn’t learn much academic knowledge from that time, but I did learn really well how to work with other people, how to be a part of a team, how to sort of self-direct and do what I wanted to do. I spent a lot of time reading. I spent a lot of time playing with LEGOs. I got really good making friendship bracelets. I had a lot of fun and then in 5th grade, my parents started getting worried about me academically being able to make it in the real world, so they sent me to a private middle school which was very academically focused.

[27-32] Before I transitioned to middle school, I learned six years of math in two weeks. This school required uniforms, homework, quizzes, tests up the wazoo. If I got a grade less than a 95 my parents would sit down with me and have a talk, “What are you doing? What’s wrong? How can we fix this?” So, I went from having no academic structure to an academic institution that was very structured. This exposure to a highly structured academic program, prepared me to go to a ‘public’ vocational high school but I had to apply to get in.

[49-56; 57-67; 78-80] I attended a high school that had a structured curriculum centered on science and technology. It is one of the top 15 high schools in the northeast. There weren’t a lot of options for electives or classes. All of the science classes that we took were marine science classes, including one technology class each year.  For example, my freshman year I took technical writing and my sophomore year I took AutoCAD. Also, during my senior year I took a research class in which I participated in a year-long research study that hasn’t actually been done before and will be published shortly about Microplastics on the ‘east’ coast and that was an amazing class. My teacher treated me like an adult, a scientist, I was responsible for my own deadlines and due dates, and her attitude towards the class and towards my responsibilities in that class really made me want to work hard for it. I really latched on to some of the better teachers which did lead me towards engineering because they staffed really good teachers for my systems engineering class, that was so much fun. In that class we did a bunch of hands-on engineering projects, we built a Balsa bridge. We made a Rube Goldberg machine which didn’t work but it was a lot of fun to do. We made that fishing lure, I still have the website which I documented my results on and a bunch of other smaller projects and concepts about system balances and, I don’t know, engineering design. The curriculum of my high school also tried to incorporate these kinds of projects into other classes. In my physics class, we made a physical model of a ‘northeast barrier’, it has sort of a trench in it and we used sound to map it.

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john quotes

John’s Family & Childhood

[20-25] I’m a [South Asian] American … My parents were both born and raised in the [South Asian Country], and came over here. They met over here and they had me, which means that I have an Asian American background. However, unlike the stereotype, I wasn’t raised with the intention of going into a doctor or an engineer field. My parents were quite different than that, they just wanted the best for me.

[27-33] I never thought I’d be an engineering student. I thought I would be something with visual or performing arts. My path before that, I was performing like every year, every semester, and I found enjoyment from that. I’ve been a high honors student since high honor was a thing in my school…. I’ve always been good in classes, and it never really clicked that being good in math and science could be my career… until I made the decision to come here.

[47-51; 53-55; 60-66] When I was younger I was a tinkerer, I liked to take things parts and found out how things worked; it didn’t always turn out well, but I stilled liked it. For that transition [from visual performing arts to engineering], I have always been a well-rounded person, so it didn’t feel like a transition, it just felt natural for me to do something else, because I’d been doing everything before. It’s still a very fun hobby of mine, […] playing instruments, but for the visual side last semester I took a jewelry course. It was the very first place that I learned how to computer model. The very first project was like a broach, where you had to make a 2D sketch of whatever you wanted to carve out on metal. You carved it, but you also had to create a backing to support magnets that would allow you to wear the broach on your shirt, and that part was 3D printed, so not only did I learn how to model, I learned how to draft, and I learned some hands on stuff all in that jewelry class, and it was genuinely the best class I’ve ever taken.

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