I am a junior at the Mass Academy at WPI. I originally lived in Tyngsboro, however I moved at a young age. Since then, I have lived in Westford, MA with my parents and my sister, who is currently a junior at WPI studying mechanical engineering. My father is a software engineer, and my mother is an accountant, which has sparked an interest in the math and science fields, specifically chemistry and robotics.
Instruments
My father is a piano teacher, and he started to teach me how to play. Upon growing older, I tried different instruments before finally settling on the drum set. I’ve been playing the drums since fourth grade, in school band. However, I ended up swapping to a private teacher since I found school band to not be what I hoped for. I’ve played jazz, pop, and rock, including Mr. Mister and Imagine Dragons songs. I’ve also transcribed some songs occasionally as well!
Sports
Sports have also been a large part of my life. Like my music experience, I swapped between sports: baseball, to soccer, to taekwondo and tennis, however I stopped taekwondo due to a lack of free time. I played tennis on the middle school team as well as the Westford Academy team in high school. I even joined the varsity team in freshman year.
Digital Art
For a while I have spent some time getting into 3D modeling using Blender and have started to make people. Over the summer, I’ve started to dive more into drawing to help with me with my anatomy as well as create templates for modeling. I made the decision to buy a drawing tablet and have been having a blast with digital art in Clip Studio Paint. I’ve been attempting to get better at drawing people specifically.
Programming
I’ve always enjoyed programming, probably due to my dad’s job. I originally started via Minecraft programming, before moving on to learning coding by myself through websites, to going to classes. I’ve done programs in quite a few environments, including Unity game programming and Visual Studio. When I was in middle school, I participated in the Zero Robotics competition through MIT. It was a team-based international competition, where we got to program satellites—called SPHERES—aboard the International Space Station. Our team managed to place first internationally! I was also an active part of the Westford Academy Robotics team, and we placed first in the Massachusetts States competition for FTC last year!
Community Service
I’ve participated in a wide variety of community service content recently, and overall have had a great time doing so! For
instance, I spent a month teaching and preparing students in Java for the Zero Robotics competition (mentioned above). This
year was slightly different, but they got to program satellites, called Astrobees, in a variety of tasks to try to make them
as efficient and adaptable as possible. This was the Astrobee’s first year, so it was even more special! In addition, the team managed to place second!
Another activity I did was introduce some children from 6-12 years old to the world of STEM and robotics along with my robotics team. We presented our robot
and even allowed them to test drive it!
Over the school year, I also had the opportunity to help teach students at the Abby Kelly Charter School in Worcester
about the great parts of STEM! The activity was completely led by Mass Academy students, and we had to develop everything, from lesson plans to schedules!
Both the students as well as the educators who participated had a great time!