Undergraduate / "a drunken stupor" - Stanford - intellectually engaging [4]

Stanford students are widely known to possess a sense of intellectual vitality. Tell us about an idea or an experience you have had that you find intellectually engaging.

Frank drove in a drunken stupor. Weaving to the left, he could not stay on a straight course and crashed into a pile of bricks.

Luckily, Frank was just a robot car built from Lego pieces. I was on my school's First Lego League team: the first date that hooked me on robotics. But, just like marriage has its arguments, I have had my disagreements with robots.

One thing I have learned from four years of robotic experience is that robot cars cannot move in a straight line-especially Lego robot cars. Those studded axles refuse alignment and caused many headaches. Using a "keep it super simple" methodology, my FLL team relied on chance and nimble eyes to aim the robot away from the target; about 15 degrees to the right would do it. Little Frank had a 75% success rate doing this. With our "wing it baby" ideology, Frank flew past the regional competitions and made it to the state level, where we quickly found out 'robots' and 'uncontrolled' are two words that should never be combined. It is unreliable, and frankly dangerous.

After this frustrating experience, I put my relationship with robot on hiatus. A year later, I received the greatest revelation while getting my driver's license: regular cars don't go straight either. Car alignment is not a stable, static system, but a positive feedback system-people use steering wheels to keep their vehicles straight. I made Ruby, a robot car to traverse a model city. Going for a controlled system, I used light sensors as the solution, setting boundaries and parameters for her to stay between. Now if Ruby strayed too far right, the right light sensor would let her know that she was off the road, allowing her to adjust the wheels left-just like humans do.

The beauty of robotics shines most exemplarily when robots and I work things out-just like marriage.

Undergraduate / 'Not claustrophobic' - To my future roommate - Stanford Prompt [8]

Prompt: Virtually all of Stanford's undergraduates live on campus. What would you want your future roommate to know about you?

To my future roommate:

Are you claustrophobic? I am not, but if you are, don't worry! I am perfectly fine with small spaces, so you'll have plenty of room. I would even call myself a claustrophilicïlover of small areas (but I love the outdoors and the unknown as well; I don't fear big areas).

I fit in tiny places. Being shoved into lockers was a reality for me (well, I would shove myself into small places to prove a pointïI am small). I'm not as tiny anymore, but I volunteer for positions where someone smaller is needed. As a Powder Puff cheerleader, I was a flyer; as class president, I was once taped to a wall.

My legs and left arm were mummified in duct tape; only my right arm was free to move about. I held a scrambled Rubik's cube in my right hand. Neurons and synapses were firing off as my index finger flipped different layer of the cube. My hand shook nervously, trying to solve the cube with one hand, while everyone stared. 58 moves and 72 seconds later, I was done. The multi-colored sides of the Rubik's cube had sheen to them. Applause, cheering, and a tint of disbelief erupted from the crowd (which was my entire high school).

But I'm not only claustrophilic in my physical environment; I love working with others closely. I love study groups and anything with 'we' in it (including the Wii). If we have classes in common, we will definitely study for tests together. My friends and I study for calculus and U.S. government together now. And, if you need help with physics, I'm your guy: I tutor physics students at my school.

I hope that your application process is going well. Oh, and on the weekends, maybe we could even go cubing together!

Your future best bud,