diff --git a/wright-application/stem-essay/main.pdf b/wright-application/stem-essay/main.pdf index cf1695e..f36308b 100644 Binary files a/wright-application/stem-essay/main.pdf and b/wright-application/stem-essay/main.pdf differ diff --git a/wright-application/stem-essay/main.tex b/wright-application/stem-essay/main.tex index 00cd35d..5743149 100644 --- a/wright-application/stem-essay/main.tex +++ b/wright-application/stem-essay/main.tex @@ -50,10 +50,11 @@ \begin{document} +\begin{center} + \textbf{\large Wright Scholar Essay (Topics 1 and 3)} +\end{center} -\noindent\textbf{Topic 3:} Research involves trying new things. Please give an example of when you stepped out of your comfort zone to experience something new in regards to science or engineering. -\noindent\textbf{Topic 4:} What do you hope to get out of the Wright Scholar experience (be creative)? \vspace{12pt} @@ -70,25 +71,42 @@ In two minutes and thirty seconds, we became league champions. It was almost hard to believe that seven months back, I didn't know what a variable was. I was fully into music, and programming was not even an afterthought. -It was mere coincidence that my neighbor (and good friend) decided to start a robotics team, and given the minimal investment, I +It was a mere coincidence that my neighbor (and good friend) decided to start a robotics team, and given the minimal investment, I joined. Like nearly all of my endeavors, my FTC journey began with a Google search. I was learning at a snail's pace, and it had taken me two months to simply make a motor move. Soon, I was hooked. Like a sponge, I was absorbing everything I had to learn, and I had eventually taught myself enough Java to become a functional FTC programmer. As the season progressed, my sponge was soaked, and we were a top competitive team by February. On competition day, the lightbulb within me finally clicked. -The joy I experienced wasn't just from our robot picking up and scoring pixels, but from the fact that code I had recently learn to write -was resulting in a tangible output that I could witness. It was that moment where I decided to pursue a STEM career. I was -no longer just a high school student, I was a STEM student, and I was ready to help change the world. +The joy I experienced wasn't just from our robot picking up and scoring pixels, but from the fact that the code I had recently learn to write +was resulting in a tangible output that I could witness. It was that moment when I decided to pursue a STEM career. I was +no longer just a high school student; I was a STEM student, and I was ready to help change the world. But that readiness was tested in September 2024. In a spur of ambitious insanity, I had committed to building a machine learning model to predict gait patterns in Parkinson's Disease for my sophomore-year Science Fair project. The problem: I had no clue how to. And so I learned. Python syntax, NumPy arrays, signal filtering, -feature extraction, model architectures. I had entered a brand new domain, and each concept seemed to confuse me in a different way. +feature extraction, and model architectures. I had entered a brand new domain, and each concept seemed to confuse me in a different way. After two months of painfully laborious learning, coding, and debugging, I was finally able to transform raw sensor data into a functional and accurate classification model. Somewhere between the first error message and the final 96\% accuracy, I had managed to absorb a new discipline by pushing myself into unfamiliar waters. +If it weren't for my ambition, I would have stopped there. Unfortunately, I realized that a working model on my laptop +wasn't going to help any Parkinson's patients, and I needed to embed my model into a complete hardware device. This +task was beyond daunting, as I had to venture into the foreign land of hardware and electrical engineering. With my +engineering teacher guiding me, I slowly learned everything I needed. After dozens of 2 AM KiCAD tutorial binge sessions, +I finally had a working +design for a fully custom printed circuit board (PCB). Two weeks later, my PCB arrived, and after soldering all my +components, it didn't work. My heart sank. I touched up all the joints with my soldering iron and tried again. Success. +I wrote some quick software in C++, and I finally had a working end-to-end implementation for my final solution. After +my project made it to the International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), the judges were impressed by the full +end-to-end implementation, and my efforts were finally rewarded when I won 3rd in Robotics and Intelligent Machines at ISEF. + +Throughout my high-school life, I have strived to constantly learn new things, which is why I am so excited about the +Wright Scholar opportunity. From tinkering in my bed, I can start working on relevant research problems this Summer, +which would exponentially increase my learning and comprehension of these subjects. From cutting-edge +biomedical computing to sensor processing to cybersecurity, AFRL offers exciting venues for me to apply my knowledge. +For a sponge who lives to learn, AFRL can serve as a reservoir of knowledge, and I can't wait to absorb new information with +domain experts. \end{document} \ No newline at end of file