Every person has a creative side, and it can be expressed in many ways: problem solving, original and innovative thinking, and artistically, to name a few. Describe how you express your creative side.
The way Lego blocks fit together always fascinated me. They would click into place beautifully and stay that way, no matter how they were connected. This impressive structural integrity meant that it was effortless to throw blocks together to create something random; however, the builds had little operating potential and failed to satisfy me. In essence, purposeless things bored me. I would challenge myself everyday to build something new that interested me. I created builds that appealed to me aesthetically and allowed me to create stories around them. I found that if a build was cool-looking and sci-fi, I would play with it longer before thinking up a new schematic.
As I became older, my childish reveries began melding into reality, and I began focusing my attention towards builds that were mobile and had less of an abstract allure to them. I began craving function and efficiency. To nurture this desire and transform it into an ability, I joined my high school’s robotics club.
Before an important competition, my team had trouble creating a mechanism intended to shoot balls at a specific target. We were focused on a single design: a slingshot, but it was too unwieldy and inconsistent regardless of our attempts. As I explored other avenues, I recalled a model I had made, in an attempt to simulate the turrets in Star Wars, that shot small darts at a target. I created a rifle-like design that employed a hammer to strike the ball in a barrel. I then made the barrel length and hammer power adjustable to create an adaptable and accurate launcher - a large step forward from our unfortunate earlier fixation.
It was in this moment that I realized that my days creating miniature spaceships and moon bases were not only the embodiment of a desire to live in the universe of my most cherished fantasies. They were sparks, igniting a vital process that cultivated my ability to think outside the box and create things that were not only special in their artistic quality but their pragmatic utility as well.