Love Of Engineering In My Life

I have always been fascinated by how engineering is able to merge analytical problem solving and mechanical mathematics with the creative design process. My love of engineering has greatly influenced me in my education and subject choices; I am currently studying mathematics, physics and chemistry. I am extremely intrigued by the practical application of these subjects, and I relish the opportunity to apply the knowledge from them to real world problems in a creative manner.

Engineering fundamentally underpins our society in the 21st century, and as our world transitions into a space based economy the need for engineers to solve these new engineering challenges will only increase exponentially. I have always had a burning desire to be a part of this great inventive system of ingenuity and creativity so that one day I will make a meaningful contribution to our world. Engineering at its essence is analytical problem solving and I yearn to constantly challenge my abilities in this area such as I did when successfully competing in the University of Southampton cipher challenge.

I have found Isaac Physics to be excellent at pushing me further: I attended a bootcamp they hosted at Churchill College Cambridge which gave me an exceptional opportunity to grow my affection of mechanics while also testing my problem solving abilities. Another field about which i am passionate but I did not take for A level is programming and computer science. I have wanted to grow my proficiency in programming as I have found it to be a logical way of laying out and analysing a problem. I thoroughly researched different machine learning algorithms and designed from scratch and my own reinforcement learning algorithm in python to learn to win the game of Tic-Tac-Toe.

This experience taught me how to organise and work through a problem which seems initially daunting which I believe is an essential skill for studying engineering. I have found that one of the lessons I have learned in my process of designing this to be clearly reflected in the underlying theme of ‘Success Through Failure The Paradox of Design’ by Henry Petroski, a book which I have found to be a particularly interesting look into the thought process behind how designs are created and improved through past failures. My greatest lesson came from analytically identifying why a feature of the program did not function as planned, and then formulating a solution to solve the problem.