This is my essay for the common app answering the question about a significant experience in my life. It is slightly long, and at times doesn't seem to make sense. Any help revising or rethinking would be really appreciated.
When I was in the sixth grade, I joined a team of individuals so unique, and so creative that it changed my life forever. We were the Cleanup Crew. No, we didn't go around town performing amazing janitorial feats. In fact, we didn't clean anything. We were a lego league team and the theme for our first year was "City Sights." Most of the missions involved cleaning up our "city," removing rocks from the soccer field, harvesting food, transporting toxic materials. It was our own little world where we could solve the problems any way we could imagine, and we had some active imaginations.
Our first year in the competition we built a fairly solid robot and did an excellent research project. We even took it a step further and broke the mold, rather than going the traditional route and appointing two people to run the robot, we decided it would be more effective if we promoted a little bit of teamwork. So we split the jobs up, two people would go to the table initially, run the first program and then they would switch out with two others and we would continue that process through all of the missions and all of the teammates. This served us well on several different levels. Most importantly the judges loved it, but as an added bonus it helped us stay calm. We were twelve, there were video cameras and screaming, needless to say, we could get pretty nervous and make some dumb mistakes. If everyone had a specialized job the chances of careless mistakes were negated. Our system worked beautifully. At our first competition, our robot performed fairly well, we made it into the Elite Eight. Out of about 50 teams, that wasn't too bad but we knew we could do better, we had done better in practice. And oh yeah, remember that research project that we did so much work on? We bombed the presentation, our laptop didn't work at first, and some of our teammates forgot what they were supposed to say. We were crushed, not only did we feel like it was almost a complete waste of our time, we knew we were better. So we were ecstatic when our coaches told us they could sign us up to attend another tournament. The only catch, it was in Dallas, Texas. That's almost 500 miles away from home. Of course, us kids didn't have a problem with that, to us there was no drawback. The parents on the other hand, saw dollar signs running away from them. We all knew we needed another chance and eventually the parents agreed. We all pooled our money together to help pay for the trip and off we went. When we finally competed at Dallas, it was a dream come true. Our research presentation went off flawlessly and we could tell the judges liked it, they kept us longer than the alloted time because they were so intrigued. Our team had been fielding questions from the judges all day long, and no one even considered stuttering. Even the robot seemed to take on a life of it's own, often not in a good way. We made it to the final four that day, we might have made it even further. But something which can only be described as strange happened. The robots we build with in lego league have an infrared sensor on the front and that is how we send programs to it. Well this was a pretty big tournament, big enough that a news station was there covering the events, and apparently the video cameras that they were using had some sort of infrared transmitter on them. I remember that moment like it was just last week. Stehvin and I were at the table, we put the robot down on the table, attached all the necessary attachments, and sent the robot on its way. Nothing seemed wrong, that is until the robot failed to make a turn when it should have. We didn't know what was going on, but surprisingly, we didn't panic yet. I ran around the table and grabbed the robot before it slammed into the wall. I checked to make sure we ran the right program. There were no programs! The video cameras had apparently erased our robot's memory and now all it could do was run in a straight line. Now we panicked. What were we supposed to do? I glanced over at the coach, who just happened to be my dad, no help really, he just said "Come on run it anyways." Well okay then, that's what we did, for the next minute and a half we ran all the straight line programs we could figure out. Although we lost that round on the scoreboard, the judges knew better. No one cried, no one was even sad for very long. Sure, I couldn't watch the news for a few days after that, I couldn't dare think what terrible problems those cameras were probably causing. But at the end of the day, it all worked out. We won first place in research presentation, and we won the Director's award. That just happens to be the most coveted award in the whole tournament, only one team from every tournament gets it, and it is your ticket to the national competition. Once again, we were pretty excited. We ended up going to nationals and won runner up director's award there. We were the second best team in the Nation. Not bad for a bunch of 12 year olds.
The fun didn't end there for us though, we kept at it for two more years, our final year we made a return to what was now known as the World Competition, we didn't do as well but we made it, and that was enough for us. Fittingly, the theme for that year was "No Limits," for the past four years that has been a personal ideology. I have no limits, and I am not about to set any.
When I was in the sixth grade, I joined a team of individuals so unique, and so creative that it changed my life forever. We were the Cleanup Crew. No, we didn't go around town performing amazing janitorial feats. In fact, we didn't clean anything. We were a lego league team and the theme for our first year was "City Sights." Most of the missions involved cleaning up our "city," removing rocks from the soccer field, harvesting food, transporting toxic materials. It was our own little world where we could solve the problems any way we could imagine, and we had some active imaginations.
Our first year in the competition we built a fairly solid robot and did an excellent research project. We even took it a step further and broke the mold, rather than going the traditional route and appointing two people to run the robot, we decided it would be more effective if we promoted a little bit of teamwork. So we split the jobs up, two people would go to the table initially, run the first program and then they would switch out with two others and we would continue that process through all of the missions and all of the teammates. This served us well on several different levels. Most importantly the judges loved it, but as an added bonus it helped us stay calm. We were twelve, there were video cameras and screaming, needless to say, we could get pretty nervous and make some dumb mistakes. If everyone had a specialized job the chances of careless mistakes were negated. Our system worked beautifully. At our first competition, our robot performed fairly well, we made it into the Elite Eight. Out of about 50 teams, that wasn't too bad but we knew we could do better, we had done better in practice. And oh yeah, remember that research project that we did so much work on? We bombed the presentation, our laptop didn't work at first, and some of our teammates forgot what they were supposed to say. We were crushed, not only did we feel like it was almost a complete waste of our time, we knew we were better. So we were ecstatic when our coaches told us they could sign us up to attend another tournament. The only catch, it was in Dallas, Texas. That's almost 500 miles away from home. Of course, us kids didn't have a problem with that, to us there was no drawback. The parents on the other hand, saw dollar signs running away from them. We all knew we needed another chance and eventually the parents agreed. We all pooled our money together to help pay for the trip and off we went. When we finally competed at Dallas, it was a dream come true. Our research presentation went off flawlessly and we could tell the judges liked it, they kept us longer than the alloted time because they were so intrigued. Our team had been fielding questions from the judges all day long, and no one even considered stuttering. Even the robot seemed to take on a life of it's own, often not in a good way. We made it to the final four that day, we might have made it even further. But something which can only be described as strange happened. The robots we build with in lego league have an infrared sensor on the front and that is how we send programs to it. Well this was a pretty big tournament, big enough that a news station was there covering the events, and apparently the video cameras that they were using had some sort of infrared transmitter on them. I remember that moment like it was just last week. Stehvin and I were at the table, we put the robot down on the table, attached all the necessary attachments, and sent the robot on its way. Nothing seemed wrong, that is until the robot failed to make a turn when it should have. We didn't know what was going on, but surprisingly, we didn't panic yet. I ran around the table and grabbed the robot before it slammed into the wall. I checked to make sure we ran the right program. There were no programs! The video cameras had apparently erased our robot's memory and now all it could do was run in a straight line. Now we panicked. What were we supposed to do? I glanced over at the coach, who just happened to be my dad, no help really, he just said "Come on run it anyways." Well okay then, that's what we did, for the next minute and a half we ran all the straight line programs we could figure out. Although we lost that round on the scoreboard, the judges knew better. No one cried, no one was even sad for very long. Sure, I couldn't watch the news for a few days after that, I couldn't dare think what terrible problems those cameras were probably causing. But at the end of the day, it all worked out. We won first place in research presentation, and we won the Director's award. That just happens to be the most coveted award in the whole tournament, only one team from every tournament gets it, and it is your ticket to the national competition. Once again, we were pretty excited. We ended up going to nationals and won runner up director's award there. We were the second best team in the Nation. Not bad for a bunch of 12 year olds.
The fun didn't end there for us though, we kept at it for two more years, our final year we made a return to what was now known as the World Competition, we didn't do as well but we made it, and that was enough for us. Fittingly, the theme for that year was "No Limits," for the past four years that has been a personal ideology. I have no limits, and I am not about to set any.
