Essay #16
From the moment we were old enough to wield screwdrivers, Dad taught my brother and me the art of woodworking. Beginning with hand tools, then progressing to power tools, and eventually mastering workshop machinery, we learned to assemble anything our house needed, from bookshelves to bed frames. Before long, I began building for fun.
The annual Cub Scouts Pinewood Derby was always a highlight of the year. My brother and I spent countless hours in the garage meticulously carving and tuning our cars with a single goal: winning it all. Under Dad’s expert guidance, we learned how to strategically position weights to maximize speed and camber the wheels to reduce friction, fashioning race cars that seemed to soar down the track. Such projects gave my father, brother, and me precious bonding time, as they’ve done for generations in my family. Whenever we visited Grandpa Rex’s home in the Virginia countryside, he was delighted to show us his latest home-improvement project. A brilliant inventor and engineer, my grandpa inspired me to take on projects of my own, which quickly began ballooning in size and complexity.
When the pandemic struck, my family decided to raise chickens in our backyard. Given our abundant free time, I proposed we save money by building the chicken coop ourselves. After creating a virtual 3D model and compiling a parts list, I recruited my dad and brother to dig the foundation, frame the structure, and assemble the enclosure. We spent weeks working under the dim light of a lantern deep into the night. Despite the long hours, I looked forward to the time we spent together as a family. When at last we finished, standing with my dad watching the hens happily clucking about in our creation delivered immense satisfaction. As quarantine wore on, I moved on to new projects, encouraged by my father, including a large backyard deck and detailed designs for a home-built RV.
Meanwhile at school, I was learning the basics of computer programming with Python. I soon realized that the creative problem-solving process of software development closely mirrored the construction projects I was undertaking at home. Captivated by the logical yet creative challenges of computer programming, I took my projects digital.
This past summer, I had the life-changing opportunity to work on my biggest project yet during an AI/robotics internship at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The first day was surreal. From the colossal white cleanroom, where technicians were assembling the Roman Space Telescope, to the mysterious Robotic Operations Center, everywhere I looked reminded me of The Matrix. After touring the center, I spent the next six weeks working with five fellow interns to develop and implement an autonomous guidance system for NASA rovers. As the primary software developer, I was responsible for coding the reinforcement-learning algorithm that teaches the rover to navigate and building a customizable desktop application for simulation training.
For weeks, it seemed that no system we came up with could keep the robot from running headlong into obstacles. My team and I spent days huddled around our conference table, covering the walls with sketches and devising potential solutions to our problem. It took hundreds of simulation trials and hours of discussion, but we finally created a reward system that taught our robot to deftly weave through any course it faced. Somewhere along the way, my teammates turned from co-workers into friends, and I can’t wait to return to Goddard with them this spring, where we’ll be advancing the project with LiDAR and deep Q-learning.
As an aspiring software engineer, I may no longer work with physical structures, but my early building projects taught me how to collaborate, design, troubleshoot, and persevere—skills that are invaluable whether I’m laying down crossbeams or writing lines of code. Looking forward, I aim to work at the frontier of autonomous systems, pushing the limits of what we can do with intelligent robots.