We all have those childhood moments that shape us into the people we are today. It’s safe to say that for me, it was an obsession with flight that started from a third-floor balcony. Little did I know that moment would be the initial spark that led me to choose Aerospace Engineering as my major at The Viterbi School of Engineering of USC.
As a young kid, I grew up in a three-story apartment building that had balconies that hung over the parking lot area on the third floor. I used to enjoy spending hours making paper airplanes and flying them off the balcony, hoping they would fly far. Sometimes, I would make them based on my ideas and other times, I would use YouTube tutorials I found. Flying these paper airplanes to the far end of the parking lot from where I stood on the balcony was the best part of my day.
This passion for flight eventually grew beyond paper into the RC helicopters and planes I would see others fly as a kid. This made me want one as well, of course. The idea that a toy could fly amazed me. I never understood or knew why flight was necessary, yet it still sparked something in me that said, “I need to see it in person.” After months of begging, I finally received an RC helicopter for Christmas. This made me so happy and excited to try it out finally. So I did… for 5 minutes… until I hit a tree.
However, my curiosity did not stop there because I wanted to learn how they worked. So what does a 10-year-old like me do? I took it apart. Of course, I could not put it back together, but since the helicopter was out of commission, I might as well have taken it apart for enjoyment. This was a consistent event for me. After taking apart the helicopter, I obviously did not find what I was looking for because I honestly did not know what I was looking for or at. The thing that I learned from this event, however, was what being an engineer was like. I loved to take things apart that I had no business doing, but these make an engineer an engineer. The desire to understand how things work, even if you don’t have all the answers, was overwhelming.
As I grew, I began to look into books and videos about aerodynamics, trying to understand why planes could fly, which created a calling for me to become an aerospace engineer. The idea of flight blew my mind. Making an object soar through the sky, though it weighed more than a paper airplane, has always amazed me.
The distance away from achieving my true passion had continued to grow closer. While in high school, I was given the opportunity of a lifetime when I earned a scholarship to get my pilot license at 17. Not many people could achieve this feat, but fortunately, I succeeded. After earning my pilot license, I truly knew that my calling, my one true passion, was to become the aerospace engineer I always said I wanted to be. This became true once I applied to USC and was accepted into the Viterbi School of Engineering.
