On the morning I first flew a drone, I wasn’t thinking about engineering or future careers. I was eight years old, standing in my backyard, staring at a tiny machine with blinking lights. When I pushed the throttle and watched it lift—shaking, wobbling, catching the sunlight—I felt something I didn’t have a word for then. I now know it was curiosity giving way to possibility. Before I realized it, the afternoon had vanished, and I had spent hours learning how to guide a fragile aircraft through the sky. Even today, drones are the one activity that makes time disappear for me.
That first moment of wonder slowly turned into something deeper. By the time I reached middle school, I wasn’t just flying drones—I was opening them, taking them apart, and putting them back together to understand why they worked. I spent weekends rebuilding motors, replacing propellers, and experimenting with flight controllers. The more I learned, the more the world expanded. Suddenly, I wasn’t playing with a toy; I was exploring aerodynamics, autonomous flight, and flight dynamics.
In high school, I decided to formalize this hobby and earned my Part 107 certification, which opened the door to more advanced flying and experimentation. I began building custom drones, incorporating GPS modules, stabilization algorithms, and telemetry systems. My understanding of drones shifted from hobbyist fascination to technical challenge: every malfunction became a puzzle, and every successful flight felt like a small engineering victory.
Last year, I completed an internship with a local drone-mapping startup. My job involved planning survey flights, troubleshooting hardware failures, and analyzing aerial data. For the first time, I saw drones not just as machines but as tools—capable of mapping farmland, assessing infrastructure, and responding to emergencies. Understanding their real-world impact only deepened my interest. I realized how much precise control, systems thinking, and problem-solving mattered—skills that also define aerospace engineering.
Teaching others came next. I started mentoring younger students through a weekend workshop at the community center. Teaching someone how to fly for the first time reminded me of my own early excitement, but it also challenged me to explain concepts like lift, thrust, and gyroscopic stability in simple terms. Watching others discover the same spark I felt at eight made me understand that learning doesn’t just happen through textbooks; it grows through shared curiosity.
Through drones, I have learned the joy of building something, testing it, breaking it, and starting again. I’ve learned how to solve problems when nothing seems to work. I’ve learned how to be patient when a flight controller refuses to calibrate or when a drone crashes on its first test. Most of all, I’ve learned how much I love the feeling of losing track of time while trying to make a machine stay steady in the sky.
What began as a childhood fascination has grown into a passion for flight, systems engineering, and exploration. The intersection of drones and space—autonomy, navigation, flight control, and design—is exactly where I want to build my future. Georgia Tech’s Space Program represents the kind of challenge that excites me: the chance to work on the next generation of flight, where the problems are complex, the solutions are imaginative, and the potential is limitless.
Drones taught me how to look up. Georgia Tech is where I hope to learn how to go farther.
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