My Greatest Accomplishment

Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others. [Revised]
(489 total, 466 without question) For the majority of my life as I grew up, I did not know what I wanted to do. I grew up alongside my brother that, from about the 4th grade, knew that he wanted to study history. This was a bit disheartening as he always had a plan for his future, and I never knew mine. I was always interested in how computers and computer chips worked. I was so intrigued that I even broke a mouse open to look at the chips inside. The event that made it clear I was impassioned for engineering was the MATE (Marine Advanced Technology Education) competition in my junior year of high school. I was in a team of five people, to build an underwater robot that would compete against ten other schools. We were competing against schools that had one or two years of experience, and some that had three to five years of experience. My team had

My title was Chief Technician Officer. My duties were to design our robot through the use of computer aided design (CAD), and to write the code that we would use to control the entire robot. I was completely new to both of these challenges. It was a huge undertaking and a difficult obstacle. After a few months of learning the design process and I successfully created our design. We were given the opportunity to laser cut a hard, durable plastic to form our chassis. I then began to code. I used two coding platforms, Python/Pygame, and Arduino C+. This happened to be more difficult for one main reason, I could no longer work with the visual aspect that CAD brought, but rather had to transition to learning complex code. I had to code for months, and did not stop until about an hour before the