94 lines
4.3 KiB
TeX
94 lines
4.3 KiB
TeX
\documentclass[12pt, letterpaper]{article}
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% Packages:
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\usepackage[
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top=0.5in,
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bottom=0.75in,
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left=0.75in,
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right=0.75in,
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headheight=0pt,
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headsep=0pt,
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footskip=0.4in
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]{geometry}
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\usepackage{times} % Times New Roman font
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\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
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\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
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\usepackage{setspace} % for single spacing
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\usepackage{titlesec} % for customizing section titles
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\usepackage[dvipsnames]{xcolor}
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\definecolor{primaryColor}{RGB}{0, 79, 144}
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\usepackage[
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pdftitle={Wright Scholar Essay},
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pdfauthor={Keshav Anand},
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pdfcreator={LaTeX},
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colorlinks=false,
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hidelinks
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]{hyperref}
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\usepackage{iftex}
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\usepackage{microtype} % Better text rendering
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% Ensure PDF is machine readable:
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\ifPDFTeX
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\input{glyphtounicode}
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\pdfgentounicode=1
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\fi
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% Settings:
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\pagestyle{empty} % no header or footer
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\setlength{\parindent}{0.5in} % standard paragraph indentation
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\setlength{\parskip}{0pt} % no space between paragraphs
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\singlespacing % single spacing
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\frenchspacing % Better spacing after periods
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% Custom title format for essay topic
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\titleformat{\section}
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{\normalfont\fontsize{12}{14.4}\selectfont\bfseries}
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{}
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{0pt}
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{}
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\titlespacing{\section}{0pt}{0pt}{6pt}
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\begin{document}
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\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.
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\noindent\textbf{Topic 4:} What do you hope to get out of the Wright Scholar experience (be creative)?
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\vspace{12pt}
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% Essay content begins here
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294 squiggly red underlines. Nearly every line of my code had errors. Null pointers,
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incompatible types, undefined variables, Gradle sync errors---I had seen it all, and each error felt like a
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dissonant chord demanding resolution. It was February 2024, my freshman year, and we had ten minutes to
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take the field for our First Tech Challenge (FTC) final match. My heart raced as I thumped the keyboard in a
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frenzy. My code was broken, and for the final match, it had to work. Time raced faster than it ever used to, and
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I finally compiled the code.
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There was no time to test, hardly any to breathe, and before I knew it, we were on the field with my index
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finger hovering over the large play button. Time paused. I heard the buzzer and pressed play. Success.
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In two minutes and thirty seconds, we became league champions.
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It was almost hard to believe that seven months back, I didn't know what a variable was.
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I was fully into music, and programming was not even an afterthought.
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It was mere coincidence that my neighbor (and good friend) decided to start a robotics team, and given the minimal investment, I
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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
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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,
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and I had eventually taught myself enough Java to become a functional FTC programmer.
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As the season progressed, my sponge was
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soaked, and we were a top competitive team by February. On competition day, the lightbulb within me finally clicked.
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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
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was resulting in a tangible output that I could witness. It was that moment where I decided to pursue a STEM career. I was
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no longer just a high school student, I was a STEM student, and I was ready to help change the world.
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But that readiness was tested in September 2024. In a spur of ambitious insanity,
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I had committed to building a machine learning model to predict gait patterns in Parkinson's Disease for my sophomore-year
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Science Fair project. The problem: I had no clue how to. And so I learned. Python syntax, NumPy arrays, signal filtering,
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feature extraction, model architectures. I had entered a brand new domain, and each concept seemed to confuse me in a different way.
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After two months of painfully laborious learning, coding, and debugging, I was finally able to transform raw sensor data into a
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functional and accurate classification model. Somewhere between the first error message and the final 96\% accuracy, I
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had managed to absorb a new discipline by pushing myself into unfamiliar waters.
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\end{document} |