Personal Narrative: Becoming A Professional Football Player

Life Goals
“Today, I will expand our operations beyond building robots by releasing this company’s first production car.” Loud cheers erupt as I announce this. “There are many new standards brought about by this car, including new technologies such as ETC, CHR, Tektronic, 4AWD, CVTs, UFE, and AWS. And here is the car itself!” Louder cheers erupt as the curtains are pulled back and the sleek futuristic body compels the audience to applaud. Elon Musk didn’t get as much attention when he released the Model S, I think. “You can know that our standards of excellence have been brought over from robots in your home to cars in your garage.”
This is what I hope to say, more or less, in around 20 years. One of the common themes throughout my life is

to dream big. I set my goals in the Oort Cloud, which is a shell of debris beyond the solar system: hard to obtain and in a zone that is not fully known. My successes in life drive my belief in these seemingly unattainable goals and in turn, drive my successes.
Through middle school, I wanted to become a professional football player.

I played on a flag football team, where my age surpassed the rest of the players. I did pretty well in that league, where I always found the flags of my opponents and pull them, no matter which direction they dashed to. Playing tackle football in 8th grade, therefore, greatly excited me. I went to another school to play football, and I did okay there. On day three, we got pads, and I learned that competing well with people who had much greater size and/or athleticism than me seemed no harder than trying to win a home run derby with Hank Aaron. We all feared the really good linemen who had much more athleticism and experience than us, me included. Once I bypassed a six foot nine teammate with a spin move, and that surprised me greatly. I decided not to continue, as I didn’t want to keep getting destroyed and sacrifice my time for something that would never come to

fruition.
Despite what happened in 8th grade, I didn’t stop dreaming big. I just realized that I needed to abound in resilience to failure and willingness to sacrifice time for my goals. Throughout my life, doing math and understanding science were two strong suits of mine, so I became very interested in energy sources. My freshman year, I looked up a whole lot of information on nuclear energy and how it worked. I learned about radioactive decay, fission reactors, fusion reactors, antimatter, and dove a bit deeper into nuclear reactions. Biology Honors simply failed to quench my thirst for knowledge. This desire to solve this problem propelled me to learn all I could, especially in math and science.
I kept learning, as Sophomore year rolled around and I met my Sophomore year math teacher, Mr.

Reed. He did something that probably began the transition that turned my desire from a pipe dream into an ever more real future event: he challenged me to write calculator programs. My first program involved a Riemann sum program for any function. I kept building on this, so that it could do all four types of sums and, in addition, draw out the sum on my calculator. I had done programming in Scratch, but real uses existed for this program to assist with. I also joined robotics that year. I worked with Lego NXT kits to build robots to compete with other robots. Since I didn’t know any C or Java to write code for the robot, I just built the robots. My childhood experiences with Legos turned into me building robots with great structural integrity. Eventually, the battlebots challenge, where robots try to push each other off a ring, came around. I built a basic frame, expanded the frame to put the motors in a tightly compacted form, and built a lifter on the front. I eliminated essentially all the weak points possible by wiggling the frame and reinforcing the shaky spots, but I soon ran out of pieces to reinforce with. In one competition, our robots pushed against each other, and then I heard a crack. Surely enough, when I went to see where it came from, our robot did not fail. Every painstaking check on structural integrity had paid off. This success lead me to jump at a vacancy on

the FTC team, where the robots use metal and larger size in construction. I ended up designing a piece in which design and construction was not difficult, but the challenge was making it reliable enough to have autonomous code written for it to reliably (without interference from other robots) succeed in its task, which I ended up doing.
That summer, my success with the robot prompted me to think of trying to buy an old scrap car and turn it into an electric vehicle and also to buy a computer. The car idea never materialized due to a lack of funding, but more importantly the future maintenance and insurance costs. But the computer did. I worked that summer in a job dishwashing where the ambient temperature likely exceeded 100 degrees and humidity exceeded 75%. The dishes made those temperatures look like chump change, some probably more than 200 degrees. But the reward of seeing computer parts in my room washed over me like Christmas in July. It took me six months to put together, as I didn’t get the power switch in the right spot and that caused a memory error light, and it took me forever to diagnose the problem as an incorrectly connected power switch. I definitely do not hold the world speed record for assembling a computer, but eventually I got there. In terms of the car idea, that didn’t ever die. As Junior year started, I learned a ton about the ins and outs of cars. From differentials to CVTs to CV joints to clutches, it all interested me.
But in the fall, I also had the epiphany that unified the two other dreams. Since I wanted (and still want) to take on the challenge of fusion, I had been thinking about a way to generate electricity from the plasma product without using steam power. It involved sending the charged plasma through a copper coil. My next thought was to spin the copper coil into another coil, and this had the benefit of compacting the design. I then realized, however, that this is very similar to how an electric motor works. The result: a theoretical fusion engine that generated mechanical energy. The importance of this discovery was that it unified my two dreams of fusion energy and cars in a way I didn’t think possible. One night, I decided to estimate the specs of the Hydra (name of the car with the fusion engine) with some reasonable parameters. The results: with 50 percent efficiency over 22000 horsepower would surge through the drivetrain with a top speed of nearly 750 miles per hour! Plus its estimated acceleration exceeded 20 Gs, much more than a human is comfortable with, and definitely enough to cause complications or kill a person! Most everyday cars, by comparison, have 150-200 horsepower and a top speed of about 125-140 miles per hour, and have no such acceleration danger. I thought initially that I had done something wrong, only to realize that these numbers had validity, they just simply had otherworldly magnitude. The Hydra tied together my two ambitions of building cars and designing fusion.
One day I hope to see these dreams change from fiction to fact. That is my reason for trying hard in school and is the basis of my thirst for knowledge. To me, the amount of attention or money I get for these dreams isn’t as valuable as how awesome and challenging they are. In about 50 years I hope to build the Hydra, with all of its complexities, and then release the Hydra and watch as it blows past the competition, and most importantly see the dream of the Hydra also come true.