Engineering school essays are tough. Here’s one that succeeded, by a former student.
Our former student got into his top choice schools, including MIT, after working with us on this essay.
Seeing it soar, feeling the burst of air, and hearing the whirring motors, I stood in amazement as my project flew for the first time. After weeks of design and research, my quadcopter was finally flying in the hallway outside of my New York City apartment. All the components were working together: the gyroscope and accelerometer constantly calibrating the speed of the motors, balancing the machine. With my engineering partner, I have a goal of programming the quadcopter to be fully autonomous. Using a compact Linux computer, the Raspberry Pi, the robot has enough processing power to analyze its surroundings using an onboard camera. In addition, it has an ultrasonic sensor to find its distance from the ground, by measuring the time for sound to reflect from the floor back to the robot. To this day, we are constantly improving our program and design. Soon, the robot will be able to navigate around the room and identify objects.
The quadcopter is my most recent project, but I have always been fascinated with making creations involving electronics. When I was ten years old, I made my first remote-controlled robot by hot gluing two motors to the ends of a chopstick and attaching a switch to control each motor. As I was starting middle school, I was given two desks because of my love for building things. Since then, I have always had a desk for homework and one for a workshop area. I use both desks every day and find I am able to relate school work to my workshop desk, from actually assembling the circuit problem for physics on a breadboard, seeing a sin wave change amplitude and frequency on my oscilloscope for math, or writing about the experience of inventing for English class. Good!
At school, I am always looking for opportunities to present my projects. For example, after my physics class learned about kinematics and electricity, I built a magnetic levitation machine to combine the two principles. It had the ability to suspend an object in the air indefinitely by increasing the electromagnetic field as the object fell and decreasing it as it rose. For my three-year science research project, I am finding the optimal conditions for wind turbines in urban areas. I built two wind turbines that automatically adjust their blade pitch depending on the wind speed to continuously get the optimal power output. My goal in engineering is to create something innovative that contributes to improving the world.
Looking forward, I see myself continuing to develop robotics. With the constant advancement in technology, the ability of AI is rapidly expanding. Soon, robots will serve food at restaurants, help around the house, and communicate with humans in novel ways. With my creative approach to engineering, I will offer a new perspective on problems and help make new creations come to life in the future.
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