My parents love to joke that when I am involved in an interesting book or hard at work on a new project, they can talk right to me and I won't even notice that they're there. Secretly, I enjoy this joke. This is because the qualities I possess that I take the most pride in are my love of learning and building, which have impacted me throughout my life in my interests and hobbies.
	When I was five, my dad brought out a dusty box of legos that he had saved from his childhood. From then until I was about twelve, legos were basically the only toy I played with. I built monstrous, weapons-filled warships, airplanes, and accurate-to-scale PT boats whenever I wasn't doing homework or chores. I even won a few competitions with my models. Legos really introduced me to problem solving and visualizing solutions. I would always imagine what I wanted to build before I built it, and to this day it helps me. Just last week I was learning triple integrals in my multivariable calc class, and the ability to visualize the shapes in my head really gave me an advantage. Its just how I do math now, and it works very well for me. I imagine complex calculations by manipulating some object representing the calculation in my brain. Canceling is like separating a small amount of silly putty from the main mass, and integrating is squishing an object down until its size is just numbers of its previous height.
	In high school, my passion for building again manifested itself in a number of projects I started. After growing out of legos, I picked up electronics, carpentry and machining. Every summer it seemed I had a new far too complicated project that I was working on, from giant trebuchets, to hovercrafts, to robotic pitching machines. I still use the chair that I built a couple of summers ago, made to look like an R lying on the flat left side. It is surprisingly comfortable.
	My current project is a robotic pitching machine. As a varsity lacrosse goalie, sometimes I don't have anybody to shoot lacrosse balls at me to practice my saves. This is why I devised a machine to find the goal and shoot lacrosse balls at a certain speed at different parts of the goal. Currently, I am working on a robotic lacrosse ball throwing machine. For a lacrosse goalie to train to make saves, there are only a finite number of regions that need to be practiced on. This is because the moves to get to these regions are the same throughout the region, and if all of these moves can become muscle memory, I could get a much quicker response time.
	At the beginning of the past summer, I started work. I drew up in sketchup a machine that could shoot a ball from anywhere between 50 and 100 miles per hour, depending on how good the goalie is. I also derived all of the equations for firing angle and speed to hit a point accurately, taking into account gravity and drag.  As such, it would also be able to accurately place the ball in either the corners of the goal, the edges of the goal, or just randomly throughout the goal. I'm actually going to make the pitching apparatus different from normal baseball pitching machines, using tracks instead of wheels to more accurately place the ball. I went to quite a few junkyards to search for motors and parts, eventually finding a treadmill machine. The controls stand of the treadmill is now my machine's base, and the motor of the treadmill will be the main motor. So far I have not started building the machine, but I already have all the programming done for the arduino. When the project is complete, it will use infrared LEDs and a modified webcam to sense the corners of the goal to shoot very accurately.
	When I complete this project, I hope to use it to really improve my lacrosse talent, and maybe even rent it to summer camps or patent it. Nobody else that I've read about on the web has built a machine for this purpose, so I feel confident that this could be my first, hopefully of many, patents.
	All through my childhood, I have been enthralled by building. I pride myself in this fact, as instead of playing video games or watching TV with all my free time, I put this time to use working on projects and improving myself. I think this fact will suit me well for such a challenging major as engineering, as I really find engineering interesting and relevant and am excited to learn more to prepare myself for my future career.