Georgia Tech

The most useful thing I own is a shoebox of components salvaged from things other people threw away. Two stepper motors, a fan from a dead laptop, an unreasonable number of rubber bands. Every project I have finished began by working out what that box could already do.

Mechanical engineering is the discipline that made that box legible to me. Before it, I was guessing — wrapping bands around a wire joint because it held, without knowing why. Learning to calculate a load, a tolerance, a failure mode turned intuition into something I could defend. I want much more of that.

I want it at Georgia Tech specifically because of how the degree is structured around building. Co-op terms mean the theory gets tested against manufacturing reality every few semesters, which is the correction I most need: I am comfortable in constraint and impatient with abstraction. Invention Studio matters to me for the same reason — machine tools available to undergraduates, not reserved for the final year.

I also want to be somewhere that treats scrappiness as a starting point rather than a story. My shoebox is not a hardship narrative; it is a habit of looking at available material before asking for new material. Given a real machine shop, I would like to find out how far that habit scales.

I suspect I will still keep the box.