"Moment" Essay
It’s the morning of February 1, 2003 and I’m preparing for an Academic Games competition at a local middle school. It’s also my 12th birthday, so I’m a bit excited also. Our team had been doing well by midday, but the atmosphere changed shortly after. During lunch a parent came in and mentioned that the space shuttle expected to land in the morning had crashed. My heart dropped. Most people just shrugged it off with a disinterested remark, but I was greatly troubled by this news.
For years previous, I extensively followed the space program, tracking all of NASA’s missions. When I was younger, I’d build space shuttles and flight centers out of LEGOs, bombard my teachers with space questions, and check out every book my school library had about space, all in aspiration of being an astronaut. The day of the Columbia accident, my perspectives changed.
For the rest of that day, the only thing that I could think about was the disaster that occurred earlier, barely being able to concentrate on what had been planned for my birthday. As a bright-eyed 12-year-old, it was hard for me to accept that something that I once had the greatest hope in failed so horribly. How could something that was so carefully engineered and meticulously organized become such a tragedy? In the weeks that followed with uncertainty in the investigations and the hold on all space missions “until further notice” I became skeptical of the whole space program. On the other hand, while closely following updates on the investigation, I had unconsciously developed a deeper interest in engineering. Perhaps what most affected me was not the disaster itself, but the realization of what engineering actually was that stemmed from it.
As the investigation concluded and a cause was found, the hype surrounding the incident also died down. I was relieved, but the effects still stuck with me. Sometime between that moment and the end of 8th grade, I shifted my focus from the elementary dream of wanting to be an astronaut to realistically aspiring to be an engineer. Just as the NASA engineers found a cause for Columbia’s disintegration, I wanted to be a problem-solver too! The combination of math and science, along with the application of learned knowledge attracted me to this field. I was always interested in science and math, never knowing what I could do with these skills until I discovered engineering.
Since then, I have immersed myself in as much as I have been able to relating to engineering, participating in robotics competitions, designing devices in SolidWorks in my spare time, and keeping updated on the latest technology. I have always strived to learn from my mistakes and the mistakes of others, and the effect the Columbia disaster had on me is no different. A newfound engineer’s mentality has tremendously altered the way I view the world and solve problems. The decision to become involved with engineering was not only a career shift, but a lifestyle change.
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