This Will Probably Work

  Original The night is filled with my confusion, uncertainty,  and doubt. Maybe this? No, it didn’t work. That? Another failed test. I scrap it all, Stuck in an endless loop. Back to square one. Is this really how I have the most fun? This poem was pretty negative since it reflects the experience I had debugging my team’s robot code for about twenty hours this past weekend. I’ve been doing robotics for a bit over eight years now, and the word “break” has a very poor image in my head. Seeing your robot break after working tirelessly on it for months (usually in only a few seconds) is one of the most demoralizing things. Here’s a funny (wasn’t funny in the moment, though) GIF of what I mean.  As much as I hate seeing things fail, I dont think I’d love the activity as much as I do without it. Just like Rosal says a break in some things like dancing is not always a bad thing, there’s so much to learn from each break in the robot. Maybe you have to strengthen this part of the...

The first thing I thought of when I read prompt four was college application season for me. I see a lot of parallels between Siddhartha’s quest for enlightenment and my goal of writing the best essays (except I still don’t know if my essays worked yet). I don’t have enough time to go over how all of my essays changed, so I’ll focus on the personal statement for this blog post. I initially spent hours upon hours reading example essays, seeking inspiration and guidance on how to write my own.  Similar to how people like Gautama couldn’t teach Siddhartha what enlightenment was, the hundreds of essays on essaysthatworked.com and collegeessayguy.com couldn’t teach me to write an essay that I was satisfied with. The best example of this is probably my two documents for my personal statement for early action apps and regular decision apps. Early Action Regular Decision Now, I could just be lazy and not want to write 24 drafts again, but I think the most significant reason why the number ...