[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.
