As a STEM major, I often get asked the question, “what were the different factors of your life that led you to pursue a degree in engineering?”

There were three different aspects of my life that led to me pursuing a degree in mechanical engineering.

Being homeschooled:

I was homeschooled for all of my life up until high school (excluding kindergarten). I tend to not mention this part of my childhood to people because there unfortunately is a negative stigma around homeschoolers; everyone thinks that we sit at home all day and have no friends, but in reality it was the opposite for me. Because I was homeschooled, I was able to take my work anywhere with me. This allowed for my robotics team and I, which consisted of other homeschooled kids, to travel the world for 8 years representing the U.S. in international level robotics competitions. This gave me a unique perspective, being able to see so much diversity from such an early age made me open to new ideas and put me more in touch with reality early on. This is important for engineering as in order to come up with effective solutions, you first have to understand the problem. Another aspect of homeschooling that helped with me becoming an engineer was the emphasis on learning how to learn as opposed to learning in order to get good grades. When I was homeschooled, I had a big say in what I wanted to study. For example, I loved chemistry from a young age, always reading books on atoms and doing experiments. My parents supported me in this and I was able to take an intro to chem high school level class in 8th grade. This then allowed me to take AP Chem sophomore year and organic chemistry at Harvard the following summer. I feel like I learned so much from these classes not just because I enjoyed the topic, but because I had been able to actively pursue my interest in them. With other subjects such as English, I feel like I haven’t learned a thing since I was homeschooled because I have no motivation to learn the subject on my own. That motivation was taken away and replaced with motivation to get good grades once high school started. I’m not saying that high school destroyed everything for me, it just forced me to focus on the things that I was naturally good at. Thankfully, I have still retained this drive to learn on my own, and I’m finding that college is a much easier environment to pursue academic passion in than my high school. It is this drive to learn on my own that has allowed me to pursue engineering because I had the motivation to pick up projects such as fixing an accordion with no prior knowledge or learning how to compose music on my own. I feel like having a drive to learn is very important for engineering because you are constantly learning new things as an engineer.

Being able to pursue engineering to a high degree from a young age:

As I mentioned earlier, my robotics team experience started with just legos, and I remember at the age of 6 or 7 (before I was allowed on the team), I would sometimes go downstairs to the club area and mess around with legos. We had crates upon crates of them, and I think this endless supply of legos is what helped foster a sense of endless solutions in me. For every problem, there were countless different ways to solve it, and there were infinite possibilities for what I could build. The mechanics of putting legos together forced me to think in orientations and distances, and I remember being able to visually assemble legos purely in my head. As time went on, we started working on more advanced robots, utilizing actual metal fabrication and soldering, however the concepts were all the same as before. I therefore attribute my ability to think spatially and mechanically to being exposed to legos at such a young age.

Having interests that are not engineering on the side:

Throughout all of my years in engineering, I have always had projects unrelated to engineering on the side that I use to keep a balance between doing what I’m good at (engineering) and trying new things outside my comfort zone (jazz music, composition, drone racing, photography). These extracurricular activities help keep a balance in life because they engage areas of my mind outside of problem solving. For example, playing jazz with other people builds creativity and social skills because it’s all about fitting in with the vibe of everyone else. Without these extracurriculars as a mental release, I would not have made it nearly as far in the curricular sector of my world.