How Feedback Helped me Finish my Senior EXPO Project. by Tom

How Feedback Helped me Finish my Senior EXPO Project. by Tom - August 2026 Scholarship Essay

Over the course of my senior year of high school, I worked on a year-long engineering project which culminated in presenting at the school EXPO to a panel of 20 judges and a crowd of well over 200 people. Feedback was one of the most essential parts of the process and without it, we would never have been able to finish the project and win 2nd Place and Best in Show at the 2026 Senior EXPO. We received all kinds of feedback throughout the year and completing the project helped me realize just how important feedback really is to improving something.
From the very beginning when we pitched our project ideas, we were already getting feedback towards the nature of projects available to us; certain ideas were too small to make a year-long project, while some would be impossible to pull off without exorbitant funding. A good project was one that had a lot of room to grow in complexity but could also be presented and understood by an audience without expensive prototypes or equipment. My original ideas were all based on what would have a cool, interesting, or creative display, but the feedback helped me hone in my ideas on things that could also be easily and most importantly effectively communicated with prototypes; so nothing that won’t make sense without actually having an expensive finished product.
The next step of the project was to search for mentors to help us turn our ideas into a real product and ensure it was actually viable outside of just being a school project. After reaching out to well over 100 researchers, companies, and experts specialized in the field of our project, we finally were able to set up meetings to talk to a few of them, show them what we have so far, and get all of their advice towards developing the project into a real product for the expo. Meeting with our mentors a few times a month over the course of several months they gave us feedback, information, and all kinds of help to completely transform our project, and even adjust the goals to be more easily presentable and communicable. Just as we expected from industry professionals, there was a lot of technical feedback towards building the project, but on top of the technical feedback, we also garnered a lot of feedback on how we could present the project and what to focus on to make it stand out. A lot of things they suggested to us were ideas that made a lot of sense in retrospect, but were also things we’d have never considered.
At several phases throughout the year we also had peer review sessions with other EXPO groups where we presented our progress to them and vice versa, and gave each other feedback. Going into the peer review sessions, we always had low expectations; the other groups wouldn’t understand the technical side of our project, and probably couldn’t give any advice for improving the product. Those low expectations were a complete mistake. What we hadn’t realized was that we were so deep into our project that we hadn’t ever taken the time to ‘zoom out’ or look at it from a larger perspective. We were continually improving and refining the product, but the overall project was just leaning more and more into one direction and had been overlooked. Feedback from another group who knew nothing about the project gave us an entirely new perspective on how we actually need to present it, knowing that our audience in the EXPO will know no more than they do.
All of the feedback we received, whether technical support from mentors, presentation advice from peers or even related to the scope and general information about the format for the EXPO from our teachers completely reshaped how we made our project, and reshaped how I think about feedback. I would have expected the mentor support to be the most valuable, and that other feedback wasn’t really going to be worth very much. Yet seeing all of the other projects, hearing the feedback from people with no clue what we were making, and learning more about what the final format for presenting was helped us refine our project in so many more ways; and helped me realize that feedback of all kinds is extremely important, especially when making something for a specific event or occasion. The mentors may have helped my group make the actual product, but my peers and teachers are who allowed my presentation to both fit into the format for the EXPO and stand out as a great presentation, rather than a technical overview that would be boring for anyone that doesn’t work in the field. Working on the final EXPO project reshaped my entire point of view on feedback, what it can be used for, and expanded my understanding of how important it is.