Hiya! I'm Elizabeth, Stephanie's older sister, and I'm 19 years old and currently a sophomore at Cornell University. I graduated high school at Barbara Ingram School for the Arts (BISFA). My hobbies include reading, playing the violin and piano, exercising, cooking (or at least learning about food!), engulfing myself in our cultural multi-ethnicity, building with Legos, watching anime, and being a nerd in general. ^-^ When I am not residing in a Cornell dormitory, I live with my little sister, my mom and dad, my fish, and three cats. My dream is to become an engineer who brings harmony into the world through the fusion of music and technology as well as discover the wonders of bio-inspired and soft robotics!
When I was in elementary school, I made my first 5 minute frame-by-frame animation for my school's talent show. I called it "Eli's Math Nightmare" and basically it was about this boy, Eli, who was afraid about the math test he had in school the next day and how he would do on it. When he goes to sleep that night, he has a nightmare involving a giant math book and some evil looking numbers. Then when he wakes up the next morning, he suddenly gets the realization that he was just dreaming and promptly decides that he will do well on the test! Yay!
In middle school, I wasn't able to do any VEX robotic events my first two years since at that time, my school didn't offer any robotic teams. However, I was able to "participate" in something called Destination Imagination. I put 'participate' in quotation marks because of something that happened literally a couple days before the actual competition date. What you need to know first is that Destination Imagination is meant to be a competition where people competing in teams of around 4 or 5 people must work together to accomplish a common goal, aka the objective of the competition. My group and I, our name being "The Constructables", decided to choose the robotics challenge in which we had to create from scratch 3 different self-propelled vehicles made with 3 different propulsion systems (ex. water powered, wind powered, electric powered, etc...) and then at the competition, we had to run those vehicles over a bulls-eye target and get them to stop on their own in order to score points. Well, after some time of designing and talking about possible vehicles, we decided to split up the work: I would design one vehicle and my other members would design the other two and another would make the presentation about road safety (which is another criteria we had to do). Seems like a good strategy to divide and conquer, right? That's what I thought too until literally a couple days (maybe a week) before the competition date, my teammates come up to me and tell me that they haven't gotten anything done and that they weren't even going to come to the competition. WHAT!? I had one working vehicle, no presentation, and I had to make the other two vehicles in less than a week while also balancing my schoolwork and other chores. I almost threw my hands up in the air in surrender about actually even going to the competition. But I didn't. I couldn't just give up on something I've been preparing for because of the mistakes of my team members. So, I rolled up my sleeves, told myself I would just do the best I can and explain everything to the judges, and go to work. Time-skip to the actual competition and I completed the whole thing all by myself. Was I nervous? Very much!!! (In middle school, I had the confidence level of about an opossum.) But I did it. Turns out, I would've won the first place prize had I had a full team, but because I didn't I was automatically disqualified. Back then, I didn't realize to what extent my actions had an impact on the people who saw me that day. One of the judges there was actually my middle school tech teacher and he came up to me the Monday after and told me that that was the bravest thing he had ever seen any student do. I have to say I was very pleased with myself after hearing that. From then onward, I didn't let anyone take control of my actions. If I wanted to do something, I went ahead and did it. Which leads me to my 8th grade year. For my last year of middle school, I transferred to a different school for their STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) magnet program. One of the things I liked about that school was their robotics team. The year I enrolled, was also the first year my school decided to change from Lego Mindstorms competitions to VEX Robotics, and that's where our annual participation in the VEX world came to light. The rest, is history. :-)
This is a short, two minute video Elizabeth put together for her college resume and application that highlights some of her accomplishments in the robotics and engineering fields from grades 8 to 12. This video features footage of the VEX competitions, the Toy 2.0 Challenge, and the 2017 World Maker Faire!
I was my high school's valedictorian and this is the YouTube video I uploaded of my valedictorian speech!