Personal Statement

My mother does not believe in throwing things away. Not broken zippers, not orphaned socks, not the rubber bands that come wrapped around supermarket broccoli. Our flat looked like a hardware shop had exploded into a library's storage cupboard: towers of National Geographic, plastic containers with no lids, roughly two hundred twist ties sorted by colour in an old ice cream tub.

For years I found this embarrassing. Then I started building things, and realised I had spent my childhood training to see potential in what other people discard.

The turning point was a regional robotics competition. Our motor controller died two hours before qualifying. The replacement cost two hundred euros we did not have and would take three days to arrive. So I opened the dead one, borrowed a soldering iron, and rebuilt it from a broken computer mouse, a desk lamp someone had left by the bins, and — I am not exaggerating — my mother's rubber bands, wrapped around the wire connections to hold them steady.

We qualified. The robot worked. And I finally understood what she had been teaching me: resourcefulness is not about having the right materials. It is about looking at what you have and imagining what it could become.

That principle turned into our school's first maker club. We had no budget, no room, and no institutional blessing — twelve students and a physics teacher who let us stay after hours. We collected dead electronics from teachers, offcuts from the theatre department, and a printer the office had given up on. Within a term we had a working 3D printer built from salvaged stepper motors, a rooftop weather station, and a mechanical calculator made of wood and, inevitably, rubber bands.

The calculator was my favourite. It added and subtracted three-digit numbers, carried correctly, and ran on nothing but gears and levers. When I demonstrated it at our science evening, a visiting engineer watched it work for a while and said, "This is engineering. Not having the right tools and building it anyway."

I think about that a lot, because I am not the applicant who had a university lab at fifteen. I taught myself CAD on a library computer with YouTube open in another tab. I learned to solder by fixing the family radio. I still ask before anything goes in the bin, because we might need it for a project.

What I want next is not a better story. It is access — a machine shop, people who argue with me about tolerances, problems large enough that resourcefulness alone will not solve them. I suspect I will keep a drawer of spare parts anyway.

Just in case.