'Cell phone beep' - Stanford Intellectual Vitality

Please help me out, i've been working on this for hours and this is all i've come up with.

Stanford students possess an intellectual vitality. Reflect on an idea or experience that has been important to your intellectual development. character limit 2000

'Beep Beep'. All faces turned grim as the only cell phone in the car died. The family road trip to Miami quickly became a nightmare as we were lost driving at midnight and now had lost all contact with help. The only form of hope, a car charger, was broken.

My eight-year-old self sensed the urgency and got to work. I pried open the charger using a pocketknife and laid everything out. A broken spring behind the metal contact caught my eye and I pondered the possible fixes. As I was thinking, my eyes suddenly landed on a stray pen. The light bulb in my head blazed to life. I knew the mechanism for a pen and I tore it apart to find a spring similar to the one in the charger. I switched out the parts, realigned the other parts, and clicked everything together. Praying that my fix would work, I anxiously jammed the charger into the socket with my eyes closed. When I didn't hear a sound, my heart started to sink. But then out of the silence, I heard a 'beep beep' and opened my eyes to see that the phone was turning on. A big smile was plastered on my face as my family cheered for me. Their worried expressions were transformed into happy ones and I felt like a hero.

At this moment, I realized how much I really loved to see how things worked. I had always liked to open up and fix things with my dad, but I did that more to make my dad happy than any other reason. I had never done it for my own enjoyment. This was the first time I realized that building and fixing things was fun. I got a rush out of it that I didn't get anywhere else. The fact that I can bring together parts that can't do anything alone into one contraption that serves a purpose amazes me still. I also love the fact that building something is pure creation. I am able to turn a concept that is in my mind into something in the real world. After this moment, I started building things for my own enjoyment. I was soon sure that I wanted to do it for the rest of my life and decided I wanted to be an engineer.

Any feedback is appreciated! I am not the best writer.

your beginning is really good. totally kept me in. i believe the last paragraph needs a little more work though. try to make it flow a little more by adding a variation of length to your sentences. it sounds a little too choppy. other than looks good!

i would really appreciate it if you could look over my intellectual vitality! thanks!

Thanks for the feedback!
So you think that the main idea is clear in it? and that I answer the question fully?

yes, i believe so. you got your point across and you certainly answer the prompt

Wow, I've tried so hard to find something to help you with on this but all I've found is that you could use dashes instead of commas when refferring to the car charger and maybe inserting especially instead of also in the 4th to last paragraph.

Grammar is on point, and you make the short sentences work! Definitely got your intellectual development across.
You've helped immensely with my essays- if you could just tell me which of my Penn essays you feel is better it would be much appreciated!

* you refer to after this moment amidst a separate train of thought, so you might want to say after that road trip or something like that to bring the focus back to your first paragraph

I still think your last paragraph needs some work. Your tenses seem a little strange (had liked) and (had never done). It's not wrong, but you could probably just use simple past tense if you begin the paragraph with something other than "even before this moment". Also, I would recommend using more complicated sentences. Many of your sentences are short and sweet like "but this time was different for me." etcetc. There's nothing wrong with it, but after 4 or 5 of these sentences, it makes your writing sound childish.

The fact that I can combine parts that can't do anything alone into one contraption that serves a purpose still amazes me.

change to something like (maybe not take word for word what i said)

The fact that I can make a contraption from parts that have on function on their own still amazes me.

Good luck! The first part was good. I hope i didn't sound too harsh.

haha i can just vision the eight year old Zain at work! brilliant! good luck! :)