The essay
Most students choose their intended major or area of study based on a passion or inspiration. Describe how yours developed.
I failed my first robotics project because I tried to make it perfect. I finished the second because I let it be bad first.
In my family, you plan carefully, you finish what you start, and you do not waste materials. This is excellent training for engineering under constraint and terrible training for iteration. My first build spent six weeks on paper and two days in reality before I abandoned it, because the first thing that broke felt like evidence I had planned wrong.
Our maker club taught me the opposite instinct. When we built a 3D printer from salvaged stepper motors, we did not design the correct printer. We built the least printer that could possibly move, watched it fail, and fixed exactly one thing at a time. Seventeen versions later it printed. None of the seventeen were embarrassing, because none of them were supposed to be finished.
What I want to study sits in the tension between those two inheritances: the discipline to make every part count, and the willingness to break something on purpose to learn where it fails. Mechanical engineering with real software in it, ideally — systems where you cannot simulate your way out of building the thing.
I am still bad at the second instinct. I catch myself planning when I should be cutting. But I now know which of the two is scarcer in me, and it is not the careful one.
