Engineering My Mind by Chace

Engineering My Mind by Chace - July 2026 Scholarship Essay

I remember being in 6th grade competing in a robotics competition for a chance to go to Nationals. We had just finished the presentation part of the competition, and the robotics side was the only thing left keeping us from reaching nationals, and that thought made the pressure feel even heavier. Despite all our efforts, we did end up placing 3rd, which didn't qualify us for Nationals, but that experience kept being an engineer with me even throughout High School, which also challenged me in ways I never thought it would.

Getting to High School, I was familiar with basic engineering, like the process, but when I first started learning CAD, that really stumped me. At first we were only designing basic shapes, but year after year the projects started to ramp up in difficulty, like designing an C02 dragster that could beat our teacher. That was the most fun project since everyone loves a little competition and also had a lot of things to think about, like what's the best shape, did we keep the weight to what the rule stated, is it too light in the front, does our car look cool, etc. We had to consider all of this while designing the car at first and also had to deal with failed prints or parts not even lining up with each other after printing. All of that made some people frustrated since our teacher looked like his stuff never failed and always lined up, but despite the frustration, we kept going. I feel like our teacher chose this project because he knew how competitive we were and that the challenge of designing it would benefit us in the long run. My group and I learned how to actually use the engineering design process which, helped us find kinks in our design, like unbalanced weight or the shape of the car causing it to have too much drag. We learned that making small changes can affect the way it functions completely and also to think about what else we can change on the car. We also learned that even though we're competing with our teacher, we could still ask him for help with the design if we were stumped, since he's still our teacher and we were still inexperienced. After all the thinking and prototyping, the final competition came, and we still ended up getting beaten by our teacher by a lot, but it was still fun seeing all the different approaches to the challenge and also the designs of all the other cars.

In the end, the competition gave us many good lessons, like how a simple change, such as more weight in the front or back cause the car to do something, or that working out the kinks in small steps is what engineers do every day. Engineering will always be something I enjoy, and it taught me that I'll learn so much more in the coming years.