Robotics — For the past three years, I was a member of my school’s competitive robotics team. We traveled to tournaments within Ohio, and even competed at the Super-regional Championship and World Championship last year. This picture shows a prototype exterior panel from our robot; we built enough iterations of the robot that graduating team members received the obsolete panels as mementos. I’ve included a picture of mine as an artifact because I am always working on something; throughout my time as a student, I’ve always been involved in an engineering project team—first a lower division robotics team, then my school’s varsity robotics team, and now I’m an active member of the Supermileage Motorsports team at OSU. I enjoy using what I learn in classes, and building something–whether that be a sixty pound robot, or a supermileage car—lets me do just that.

Guitar — This is my guitar. It’s not the best guitar in the world, and it’s not the worst guitar in the world, but more importantly, it’s my guitar. I’ve played guitar for the past three years, and I’m not a very good guitarist by any measure thereof, but I’ve included it as one of my artifacts for that exact reason. Playing guitar is a relaxing challenge for me; I’m not at all innately talented at it, and there’s always going to be one song that I can just barely keep up with. But while I think that it’s beneficial to become better at what I’m already good at, I think it’s also important to do something that’s outside of my engineering-physics-calculus comfort zone.