personal essay

Solving problems is fun. In schoolwork, most of the problems are generally easy to solve: be they Calculus, Programming, circuit construction, predicting the results of some circuit, lab, or thought experiment. I want to study Linear algebra sometime on my own. I believe that a math class of this level would force me to think more about what each problem is asking, instead of figuring out what needs do be derived or remembered to find the solution. Looking back on my recent mathematical history, I wish I had practiced and studied more, because although I have the skills necessary to solve the problems from this timeframe, they are not as speedy or well developed as they should have been. For this reason I plan on retaking calculus in college.

There are some problems that take groups of people to solve, such as designing, building, wiring and programming a robot, or building a house. Although my homework prevented my from being heavily involved in the robotics club at my school last year, I am very proud of their success, and wish I could have helped more. This year I plan on keeping my homework from swamping me by getting what I can done ahead of time so that I have a buffer to give me more time during the build period to work on the robot. I hope that my participation in this year's robotics challenges will be as rewarding as my Mexico mission trip this summer.

The Mexico Mission Trip was highly enjoyable and rewarding. It was awe-inspiring/awesome to see the completed building and realize that we had built it from the ground up in under a week, without any heavy machinery (we being my church youth group and eight supervising adults, making a work crew of 25). Now this building wasn't very complicated nor comparably cozy when we left it (here it would be comparable to a nicely constructed storage shed the size of the average classroom with a concrete floor), but we had built it with love, attention and (most of all) hard back breaking labor, for which we received a great deal of gratitude. We had solved the problem of the family being cramped in one room; now the family of five had two rooms to live in.

In conjunction with my church, we built a house. In conjunction with Amor Ministries (the organization in charge of scheduling and organizing the whens wheres and materials necessary for such an undertaking), we helped ease the condition of one poor Mexican family. My youth group, which does this trip every year, is just one piece of the solution to the lack of decent housing in Mexico; there is a whole conglomerate of youth groups that journey to Mexico to help solve the problem. In robotics it is the similar: there are people all over advancing the science and solving problems with different aspects of it, and only when different pieces mesh are the problems solved. In this world of science, technology we students are mostly learning lessons already learned so that we can proficiently approach the more complicated problems that we will undoubtedly come across in our futures.