Undergraduate / The faculty of thinking and acquiring knowledge; Stanford/ Intellectual Vitality [4]

So here's my answer to prompt #1, tear it apart please!

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.

"Why?" was the usual response I expected from my parents when I asked if I could build a trebuchet. The answer was provided when they saw three teenage boys victoriously launching oranges halfway down the street. After much rebuilding and reworking we had a five-foot wooden structure that flung oranges over our neighbor's fence half the time and propelled juice grenades into my kitchen window the other half. The trebuchet was a pile of rotting wood and rusty nails jutting out at all angles, but somehow arranged in a way that the movement of the counter-weight provided enough momentum to slingshot those juicy projectiles higher than the tallest telephone poles in our neighborhood.

However, I realized that the only reason my trebuchet worked was because of trial and error. The sling tore within the first two launches, but the new and improved sling, utilizing the unparalleled strength of marine rope, was installed before the sun set. The structure wasn't sturdy enough, but two crossbeams fixed the problem. Some might call these failures or mistakes; I call this learning. Intellect is defined as "the faculty of thinking and acquiring knowledge", and learning from mistakes is one of the best ways to acquire knowledge. Leonardo Da Vinci's first trebuchet design fell short of his expectations but he didn't give up and improved each design.

All the years of building Lego towers that fell down, producing lop-sided Erector contraptions and launching misguided orange projectiles has led me to my love of engineering and physics. I'm always ready to learn from my experiences whether they end up successes or failures. Who knows? Maybe one day instead of launching oranges into my neighbor's yards I could be launching oranges to Mars.

Thanks! - John