Undergraduate /
Lego Kits - "My interest in mechanical engineering"- UIUC prompt [4]
derp i cant personal message.
Here are two versions of the essay. tell me which is better please.
Version 1
Growing up with tales of amazing robots that helps people perform complex tasks on television and articles, I wanted to build even more intricate robots. Every Christmas, my parents would get me the same gift, Lego Kit. And with this massive collection of Lego pieces, motors, sensors, gears, lights, cameras, and batteries, I created myriad amounts of robots, which, simple as they were, geared my interests towards Mechanical Engineering. I wanted to take my dream further. I found out a robotic class in my high school that teaches how to build and program robots from scratch. I immediately decided to take it.
On the first day, my instructor gave the assignment to build a16-feet-by-18-feet, remote-controlled robot that picks up ping-pong balls. I research the mechanisms and thought about all the different ways to build my creation, I realized that an engineering's greatest task is to learn from the experience of the numberless past models and formulate a more efficient and novel concept. Without many definitive boundaries limiting my ideas, the amount of creativity that lies in the machines that I can create is only restricted by the bounds of my imagination. With this new found inspiration, I successfully constructed my first mechatronic piece of work from raw material. I gained from this project hands-on experience on engineering. I like it.
Version 2
Every Christmas, my parents always get me the same gift, Lego Kits. As a result, I have been building a massive collection of Lego pieces, motors, sensors, gears, lights, cameras, and batteries. With these components I created myriad amounts of robots, which, simple as they were, geared my interests towards Mechanical Engineering. Growing up watching robots on television and reading about amazing robots that could help people perform complex tasks, I want to build more intricate robots and take my dream further.
Fortunately, my high school offers a robotic class that teaches how to build and program real robots from scratch. When I discovered this class, I immediately decided to take it because I wanted to build multifunctional robots and gain more hands-on experiences on engineering. On the first day, my instructor assigned me to build a remote-controlled, 16 feet by 18 feet robot that can pick up ping-pong balls. After researching the mechanisms and thinking about all the different ways to build the robot, I realized that an engineer's biggest task is to have to come up with an efficient and original piece of work based on an almost endless amount of existing models. Without many definitive boundaries limiting my ideas, the amount of creativity that lies in the machines that I can create is only restricted by the bounds of my imagination. Having this mind set, I successfully designed my robot and constructed it using parts that I made from raw metals. This project piqued my interest with robots and solidified my passion in mechanical engineering. To become an engineer and to build imaginative and creative machines and to always improve on it is, for me, a dream coming true.
