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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lWFudXkgPoOPA_ZwDni3Ud_Hc9kYqxX1DbXaORiw5rY/edit?usp=sharing
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Common App #2: Recount an incident or time when you experienced failure. How did it affect you, and what lessons did you learn? (650 word Limit)
I have always been told by my teachers and parents that I was “just so smart” without much consideration to the definition of the word. But last summer I applied to a small technology center in my neighborhood, which changed my whole perspective on what it meant to be “smart”. We were assigned tasks, which involved teaching young people from the neighborhood various technologies such as laser cutting, and programming. We also created projects that contributed to the community’s knowledge of technology. Initially, I imagined my biggest endeavor would be to get out of my comfort zone, abandoning my reserved nature, to teach kids who were eager to learn. I never believed that the very first experience of my first project would be my biggest obstacle, yet ultimately serve as my greatest teacher.
Being new youth teachers Naeem, Gordon, and I decided to build a wheelchair that could climb up stairs with the hope of addressing the challenges faced by residents with physical impairments. It was a very ambitious project for us to take on but then I was under the illusion that I was “smart” and always assumed this project would be a cakewalk. The problem was that the lessons I learned in school, the theoretical knowledge and competencies didn’t really transferred into practice over to the things I needed to know to execute the project, and we still needed to work on making a chair that move upstairs. I stayed up night after night glued to the computer, doing research on how to make things move and interact with each other. I asked co-workers for help and even read college textbooks on electronics and circuitry but to no avail. As weeks passed and the inevitable deadline was approaching, I began to ponder about what was wrong with me? I was able to understand the physics behind movement of objects, identify every bone and muscle in the human body, and solve complex inequality equations that I thought would come in handy for this project. I gave it all I got, but it all came down to me to running out of time at the end, all we had was a small chair that couldn’t even move forward, let alone go up stairs.
This past summer, two new youth teachers Tyla, Mailot and I began to work on a new project that hadn’t even been done before at the tech center; an iPhone app that suggests your wardrobe in the morning depending on the weather. Although the idea of having to program lines of code seemed frightening at first, I reassured them that we won’t have to do coding all the time. I organized the group into two different sub-categories, Programming, and Graphic Design. The app was able to detect the weather, scan the user’s face and place it onto an avatar, and it was capable of telling the user what to wear the next day. It brought me great satisfaction to know that this year, we would actually have a project that was functional and presentable.
Now that the project is done, I developed a new and interesting hobby for myself that I never would have seen or could even remotely relate myself to doing until college. During the school year, I continued to work on side projects and help new users on an online forum get through their first programming struggles. I thought that I had to wait until college to start understanding computer jargon, but that’s not true - I have opened myself to the potentials in the world of programming and became responsible for who I would be in the future. My group and I struggled through the learning curve of iPhone programming, and the complexity of Photoshop together which made me realize how much more important it was than just being labeled as “smart”. As rightly stated by Steve Jobs “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish”.