I come from a school strong in STEM. But it’s also a school where the engineering I fell in love with as a carefree elementary schooler folding paper airplanes and building lego robots is overshadowed by late-night test cramming and equation-memorizing. On Flight Club Aerospace (FCA), I struggled through open-ended questions. How could we improve the fuselage? Or actuate the rudder? Or design a cheap, light front landing gear? I learned to research, problem-solve, and above all, criticize my work, searching for flaws. No matter how hard it was, I was always supported by others struggling towards a common dream. That’s the magic of FCA. That’s the magic I want to share. I spent hours designing lessons on CAD and physics for FCA’s summer camp targeting middle schoolers. Over a few weeks, I watched our campers, most of whom had never touched CAD before, understand and model their own planes. As Vice President of Engineering Club, I use skills from FCA to design activities for club members: from gliders and spaghetti bridges to cardboard scissor-lifts. I show them that engineering is not just fun but accessible to anyone with scissors, glue, and some scraps to start building with. I watch them love making as much as I do — and then make it their own. At the Hiller Aviation Museum, I spend weekends explaining the Boeing 747’s controls, rejoicing when a kid's eyes light up as they pull the yoke or turn the trim wheel. I teach them to fly drones and program robots through a maze — the museum’s purpose, after all, is to inspire them with the side of STEM that isn’t taught in schools. I dream of working at an e-VTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing) aircraft company. I envision a future where autonomous electric aircraft replace cars, minimizing congestion and pollution in urban areas. I know the problems. Most energy isn’t “green.” Batteries are too heavy. Propellers are too noisy for urban flight. As an incoming freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology seeking a master’s degree in aerospace engineering, these are the kinds of problems I want to solve through research. I’m an engineer. I want to help bring sustainable, clean aviation to everyone. Along the way, I won't forget the people I touched. Students are hungry for change. Our engineering club membership keeps growing. I’ve met so many passionate, brilliant engineers at FCA. The reality is that they’ll take any opportunity to escape the grind and create something truly meaningful. Through everything I do, and everything I will keep doing, I try to show them that engineering is more than the textbooks and equations our school teaches — it’s a way to make, and they can make anything.

My first week on Flight Club Aerospace (FCA) was built on dozens of little red error boxes bleeding from a Fusion 360 window. Maya asked me to simulate the fuselage (our aircraft’s body) using the modeling software’s stress analysis tool before the week’s meeting. Every morning, I tinkered. Constrain this beam? Increase mesh refinement? Enable mesh sizing per part? I went methodically through every setting. Every afternoon, my attempts returned a screen filled with errors. Tinker again. Run again. Fail. Again. I scoured Fusion 360 forums for solutions, only to find that our thin pipe walls and complex joints made meshing — and therefore simulating — the fuselage nearly impossible. Matt told me to increase mesh refinement, which I did to no avail. At the meeting, I was ashamed to admit that I didn’t have a single successful simulation. Maya shrugged my worries off. “Nobody’s gotten a solve.” We fiddled with simulations of cubes and contorted angled contraptions before returning to the fuselage. It took a dozen failed simulations to get one to solve, but once I did, I churned out dozens of load cases in days, flooding the Slack with wobbly rainbow-colored simulation results and similarly flashy heart emojis. In that first week I glimpsed what FCA really is: high schoolers united by the dream of building a plane, kept afloat by a deep well of background knowledge, many aircraft builder’s manuals, and blind hope. In the three years since, I’ve learned three things. My time on FCA is marked by failure. I had been on the team eight months when Jump Aero said our wing would snap at high angles of attack and we switched to designing a 12 foot wingspan prototype. A year later, the prototype flew, briefly, before the landing gear crumpled at landing. The year after that, it crashed again. Every failure hurt. I’ve cried. But every time we fail, we stop, rethink, rebuild, and often fail again — but fail better. I’ve stopped expecting the first, or even the third, iteration to be perfect. FCA taught me that failure is a critical step in the path to success. FCA threw me in the deep end. I crammed my brain with tail design, theories of lift, and aircraft fasteners, teaching myself statics and mechanics of materials from Professor Jeff Hanson’s videos to calculate the spar-strut system’s strength. When I first led a subteam and begged Maya to explain the control system, she instead offered me aircraft builder’s manuals: the keys to any problem. It took hours of pouring over technical drawings to piece together my answer, but when I did, I felt empowered. Though I still get nervous every time I start a new subteam, I’ve never had the same night-before panic. FCA gave me knowledge, but more importantly, it gave me the reassurance of knowing where to look. FCA’s members are the team’s beating heart. We laugh at previous iterations of the fuselage (“it looks like a crocodile”), argue over the advantages of 4130 chromoly and 1018 aluminum, and suffer through many engineering puns. They allowed me to fail and explore, a gift that I try to pass on to each new member I train. They are the magic of FCA. They keep the dream of flying alive. That’s why I dream of working at an e-VTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing) aircraft company. Each company seeks something — congestion-free transport, medical deliveries, or faster first responder times — but beneath these marketable goals are yet unsolved problems: energy-dense batteries, light yet compact airframes, and autonomous systems. That is the kind of engineering I dream of working on, surrounded by passionate engineers, struggling, sometimes blindly, through problems that don’t yet have a solution, and creating something revolutionary. I just hope that before then, someone improves Fusion 360’s mesh generation.

“Stands built of driftwood, canopies of algae and seaweed and slime, fruit of bone bleached coral and writhing starfish. And the people — there are no people, but ghosts of laughter and strange, almost sentient beings of fluttering plastic and scrap metal hearts.” I’ve agonized over descriptions since joining my high school’s student newspaper, the Outlook. By writing an article a month, I learned how to conduct professional interviews and remain unbiased, but mostly, I learned how to cram a story into 800 words. At the year’s end, I was proud of landing on the front page 3 times — but I knew that I wanted to write more freely than the inverted pyramid structure allowed. “From above, the roads of the Slums were mere cracks, the chinks in otherwise the rusty armor that covered the Earth like a second skin.” During quarantine, I began crafting a story about a materialistic government that can manipulate minds and the rebels that take it down. It started as a commentary on consumerism and the Bay Area, but grew as I pulled bits of American history and scraps of people I’ve met. Looking back, it feels quixotic — sometimes simplistic — but I’m still proud of the first sixty thousand words I’ve committed to paper, self-published, and even sold. When another writer commented that my book made them feel like “even if the powers that be don’t hear us, at least we’re hearing each other,” I was stunned. That was when I realized what “death of the author” means: here was someone I had never met, for whom the people and worlds I created had gained a life and meaning independent of me. Storytelling has the power to grow and connect beyond the storyteller. “You’re on the ground and the drumbeat of your heart is all you can hear. There is no breath, no thought, just the pulse to remind you that you are alive, to remind you of every drop of blood still in your veins.” After I started, I couldn’t stop. I keep paper and pencil beside my bed to capture dreams and late night musings. I marvel at Neil Gaiman’s prose and Jonathan Stroud’s characters. I scrutinize song lyrics. I capture the people I meet, trying to imagine the stories the boy with a Red Bull and clothes the colors of a beach ball or the girl with electric blue highlights and a jacket stitched with Día de los Muertos skulls might hold. Writing to me is not just an escape. It’s a way of seeing the world in agonizing detail, absorbing every glimmer and rustle. It allows me to explore not just myself, but the world around me. That is why writing matters.

When I think of my life, I think of the smell of wood dust and WD-40. I think of shops. No one expected it to be this way. Growing up, everyone — most of all my parents — told me that I would never be an engineer. I played with train tracks and paper airplanes, but when I admired my peers who built rockets in their garages, I was laughed at. “That’s too dangerous.” “That’s for white boys.” “You can’t be like them,” they said. But I didn’t want to believe that as a Chinese-American woman, I couldn’t be like them. So I worked harder, taking on every project, trying to design on my computer or build at the library with a classmate’s tools because I didn’t even have a hand drill in my house. I’ve lied about what I was doing, promised I’d leave projects that I never did. I was desperate to claim that title for myself. But being an engineer isn’t a title. I’ve been that since the day I said yes to joining Flight Club Aerospace, and got thrown headfirst into aircraft fasteners, airframe design, and aerodynamics. Since then, I’ve been in dozens of shops. Using skills from FCA, not only did I develop the idea behind a winning experiment proposal for the NASA TechRise Challenge, but also helped design, build, and troubleshoot the microgravity chemistry experiment for launch on a Blue Origin rocket. At the Summer Science Program, I learned to collaborate with an eclectic community of students, realized the power of computer science when applied to astrophysics, and developed Python programming skills, especially debugging, through writing over a thousand lines of code to calculate the orbit of an asteroid. But I always come back to Flight Club Aerospace, because it made me more than an engineer. By connecting me with aerospace professionals, it gave me a dream. I envision a future where autonomous electric aircraft replace cars, minimizing congestion and pollution in urban areas. Drones could maintain high voltage power lines and perform last-mile deliveries. Sustainable, clean aviation could be for everyone. I know the problems. Most energy isn’t “green.” Batteries are too heavy. Propellers are too noisy. As an incoming freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, seeking a master’s degree in aerospace engineering, these are the problems I want to solve by doing research. But, unfortunately, I need financial support to be able to focus on research and coursework. I need someone to believe in me when my parents won’t. When I graduate, I dream of designing autonomous electric aircraft. I want to be part of the movement that brings safe, sustainable urban flight to everyone, and more than that, I want to be the role model for young women like me who were told that engineering was a “white boy’s thing.”