The Exploritorium by Jacob

The Exploritorium by Jacob - December 2016 Scholarship Essay

There are many things I’m proud of in the world of my academics, my grades, my class rank, my ability to comprehend content on a deeper level, but none come close to Internship I received for engineering in my school district.
Over the summer my truck wasn’t getting good enough fuel mileage so I decided to build a hydrogen Generator into it to supplement my gasoline to increase the BTU produced for each gallon of gas. When I came back to school, this year I showed my Honors Chemistry teacher from the previous year and she went and got my principal to come look at what I had done. The principal was so proud and excited that he went and got me an internship at a new engineering building that just opened up in my school district. In trying to be the best in the district our school district opened up a building to promote stem training and education in the district. This was deemed the Exploratorium.
What made everyone so happy at my school that they wanted to give me a job in the afternoons, is that when I saw a problem I didn’t just complain about it. I evaluated different solutions and implemented the best one to solve my problem. That’s the building block of being an engineer. Evaluating a situation then planning multiple solutions, and I did all of this on my own after school over the summer.
Since I’ve been a part of this building I have been able to build some incredible projects. Right after I got there the mentor there and I built a much larger hydrogen generator capable of running a lawnmower engine completely gasoline free. Built a hovercraft to demonstrate Newton's laws to middle schoolers, and we built a trebuchet for Halloween so we could have pumpkin launch for our school.
I am so proud of getting this internship because it has let me open new doors. I am able to build any project I want to work on. I get hand’s on training using a CNC machine, I get code and build robots. I built a hovercraft and flew around the school. This place is so intellectually fulfilling, and I got there off of my own ambition. That’s why I am so proud of it. I got myself there.

Videos of my projects
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bwsf2DNpixqnc1lvMGlNcUVGVlU
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bwsf2DNpixqnSEthWEVKNWlXS245X0N2ZkM4RzgwNUM1TjZN
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bwsf2DNpixqnZmVtUnFlMGx6MVE