A Mechanical Oasis Hyungjoon Kim

With great celerity, I rushed towards the large, oaken doors, hoping that I hadn’t missed the start of a new adventure. After the doors creaked open with a slow, decaying roar, I quietly crept along the shadowed aisles, the seating area filled to the brim with rows of visitors, all teeming with excitement and anticipation for the assembly to start. The speaker, who had a proud disposition and even prouder beard, looked upon the audience before him and said, “I see great potential and future engineers in each of you here.”

The assembly was called as an invitation to my school’s robotics team, a place I had previously thought I had no place in. My older sister, who is currently attending college to pursue her STEM-related dreams, forced me to go to the meeting. She believed that, as a freshman, I should expose my mind to new hobbies and clubs in order to broaden my scope of the world and make use of the prized intellect that she claimed I possessed. Of course, going into high school, I never developed a sense of purpose and never aspired to do or become anything. I simply existed and lived day to day, struggling to hold onto what little I had left of my childhood. But I agreed to go, and thought to myself that this obligatory...