Undergraduate /
"Dean Kamen happened" -draft of personal statement. [6]
We stood there anxiously, waiting for it to work. I reached by palms out, by then glistening with nervous perspiration, to tug at the wires once again. The nails lay in front of us, inviting us to use them to end it all. The tension had begun to get under our skin. My friend took the longest nail his clammy hands could find and raised his had in a stabbing motion, as I watched in horror. Before I could intervene, he brought it down with a thud, to end all our work for good. To my surprise, the wooden blob started spinning, and the bottle cap started its long awaited journey, mimicking an assembly line.
Damn, it's hard work making a piece of wood turn, we thought with big grins plastered on our faces.
It has been a while since I spent my Sundays building an assortment of strange scientific models. Perhaps, my fascination with models stemmed from my childhood obsession with Tony Stark. Perhaps I believed that I could create my own Iron Man with the scrap metal pieces and tangled mess of copper wires. Whatever the reason, a large percentage of my "experiments" were nothing short of fiascos. The massive amount of metallic trash accumulated through years of craziness underneath by bed bore witness to it. However, I did not stop trying my hand at it, I couldn't. It was way too much fun.
I had never believed that science could be the panacea of a society. Living in one of the ghetto type regions of this country, it was plainly evident. Technology was for rich kids to purchase, and for tech firms with million dollars of funding to produce. The middle class and the extreme poor were left entirely out of the equation. None of my friends had Ipods, or even cell phones. Why then should we care at all about science, so I thought.
Then, Dean Kamen happened.
Browsing through the few channels we get, I stumbled upon a man showing strange robots dance. It was pretty cool. But what really got my attention was the work he had done with them. Through FIRST, he had reached over 2500 children, provided them with the tools and knowledge to have their own inventions. Most impressive of all, almost all of these children, irrespective of what financial background they are form, went to college.
Years have gone by since I had come across FIRST, and many similar organizations, some of which I have worked with in later years. My appreciation for science and what is capable of doing has only grown with me.
But these thoughts were not what I had in mind when I saw the bottle cap moving, albeit with a number of bumps and bruises, towards its end point. It was a thing of intuitive beauty. Sometimes it doesn't matter what the global or social implications are. Sometimes science just makes you happy.
