Building The Future by Brianna

Building The Future by Brianna - June 2017 Scholarship Essay

Growing up, I spent the majority of my time brushing my fingers over Lego pieces spread across my carpet. I remember twirling them through my fingers while pondering the question as to what I should build next. It was not until I got involved with the robotics competition offered as part of the Mathematics Engineering Science Achievement program at my school, that I realized that there is more than just asking myself what I could build, but what I could program as well.
Every year I participate in one or two of the competitions offered by our school’s MESA program. Last year a few friends and I thought it would be a neat idea to try something new and sign up to be a team for the sumo robotics competition. Our physical robot was built out of Legos whereas all of the programming was done online. We quickly realized how much work we had in store for us. First we sat down and planned out how we wanted our robot to look as well as what specific functions we could program it with the time we were given. After this was settled, we decided to split up the work so that two of us would focus on building the robot and the other two would work on programming it. It took several tries before we even got our robot’s sensor to work properly but by working together we were able to come up with different ideas or tweak each other’s ideas until we came up with the best designs we possibly could. Though our robot didn’t win last year, we were able to work hard on our robot and we were able to come back this year and win first place in our county.
Since last year I have been obsessed with the idea of programming. Programming a computer to do something excites me in that it is one thing to teach a person a language, but a computer? There is also numerous paths that can be taken in this field and I am eager to not only get involved with the courses offered in college, but with the clubs relating to my majors of interest as well. While attending college one of the key aspects of Computer Science that I want to focus on is cyber security to help ensure the safety of those using the internet.