As part of senior classes at Interlake, we are required to find an internship in hopes of giving students more working experience in the real world. For me, I connected with a Civil/Engineering Professor at the University of Washington. Here, I was able to learn firsthand about the cool technological advancements that have taken place in the recent years within the transportation industry, all the while working with post-doctorate students in constructing a brand new course titled "Introduction to Autonomous Vehicles" for the UW Youth and Teen Program. In the summer of 2022, I taught this course to 24 students and it was a huge success!

I got my hands on my first ever LEGO set and Transformer figurine at the age of 3, and these toys are for certain not made for kids of such age. It was frustrating, to say the least, but after spending time hand in hand with my parents, I fell in love with them. The hands on experience, the unique puzzle solving, the need for creativity, and the exhilarating feel when a build/transformation was complete won over my little heart, and this passion I have with such toys, but also the intricate mechanisms introduced within such, still persist with me today.


--- FTC Robotic Season 2021 ~ 2022 ---
This season served as my last season within high school robotics. Naturally, the goal was to do as much as we could to achieve success in the year. I was able to meet so many teams and people from all over the world, whether that be other students, teams, coaches, volunteers, it was incredible to learn about everyone's story. I was extremely proud of the impact we had on the community this year, from starting a large grant program for new teams to selling my innovative drawer slides to the community (which had a big influence on both our own season as well as other teams' seasons!). We were also fortunate to win the Inspire Award in Washington State for the second time in a row, advancing to the Houston World Championships where we tied for 3rd as Division Finalists. Despite just being 2 years old as a team, it's beyond crazy to think about all that we've achieved. So much pride to have been apart of this team!



Videos from our season:

--- FTC Robotic Season 2020 ~ 2021 ---
This season, 2020-2021, my friend and I formed our own team - 18225 High Definition where I serve as one of two head captains overseeing the entirety of a team of 12 members, and as the manager of all technical development, taking responsibility for all architectural design and implementation. We are actively working on completing each subsystem for competition in January. We've experimented and pioneered a variety of new concepts and mechanisms (e.g simplifed fuzzy PID control is designed/implemented) to build our robust robot "Scorponok".
 

Overall, this activity has been a very big commitment of my efforts and time, but it does an extraordinary job at quenching my passion for STEM in terms of robotics design, building, and programming. This competition also pushes students to be more involved in giving back to the community, formally documenting engineering procedures, and much more. On top of it all, this FTC program has helped develop my leadership and management skills, due to the many responsibilities given to me with this role. It is undeniably an incredible opportunity that has positively affected my life in these recent years, and is one that I am immensely grateful for.

--- FTC Robotic Season 2019 ~ 2020 ---
My most memorable season in the First Tech Challenge robotics competition was on the team of 12611 TechNova as Build team and Drive team co-captains. It was quite an experience, having to manage the development of each subsystem for the robot. During this year, I designed and built the foundation hook system, delivery system, delivery claw, retractable autonomous claw system, as well as cap stone. I was also the one that completed the designing and implementation of our odometry pods, which is crucial robots to effectively and precisely navigate during the autonomous period. With everything working as intended, we were able to be the first robot in the world with a consistent 4 block autonomous, and had one of the most reliable 5 block auto programs globally as well. The two biggest technical errors of the season, electrostatic discharge as well as wobbling in drawer slides, were both resolved by me as well. The latter especially, I engineered a seamless solution to this issue while also creating other additional improvements to traditional drawer slides, which eventually led to my first patent!


My initial capstone Design used in League 1 competition


My designed delivery claw with compactness and 270° rotation


Accurate and effective odometry wheel pod designed and CADed by me


My simple solution for resolving ESD issues
The issue haunted our robot's performance all throughout our testing sessions as well as league 1 competitions, where the robot crashed and stopped working completely mid match. Fortunately for us, after my working all night for solutions just the day before the league 2 competition, I came up with this idea of bringing some moisture to the system, and after the addition of my tactic, such an issue was eliminated all together, creating a much more reliable robot for competition for the rest of the season!



Modifications I made to traditional drawer slides to mitigate issues such as wobbliness and wasting space
Eventually developed into the patent (#62953890) that I hold today



My pioneered retractable slide mechanism that allows the robot to travel in a straight line to reduce time significantly for cycles during autonomous portion of competitions. The vedios present the proof of concept, implemeentation, and real life practicing.


Me assembling and doing maintenence on our robot


Interleague Robotics Competition with me as robot operator (matches, break, and awards)




Early cardboard proof of concept model for Technova's Skystone robot that I created and presented to the team

In the domain of athletics, I am a member of Bellevue Ultimate Club, a club varsity Ultimate Frisbee team. I find this sport to be very unique given the sport’s concept and use of frisbees (and not a ball), which adds a pretty sizable but entertaining learning curve. It really has forced me to exercise my reflexes, quick thinking, as well as team coordination skills. Very tiring sport, but I greatly enjoy it! Although originally planning on playing once more this fall season, this opportunity was canceled due to the pandemic.

I love Discord. It’s my favorite social networking platform by far, and is incredibly popular in this generation. In an effort to build community as well as to have a means for all of my peers to socialize, help each other with questions, and do work together, I created a full scale Discord server for the Gifted IB 2022 cohort. I own the server and lead an admin team to help create the best experience for over 140 of the 147 students in the group that are within the server. It has been consistently used on a daily basis and received endless amounts of positive feedback, which I am very happy and proud of.