The End of My Science Fair

My team’s science fair didn’t end up moving onto the next round.

There were a lot of reasons that contributed to this outcome, but one of the most prominent reasons as to why we didn’t succeed was:

The team leader’s goal was the prize money.

This singular reason triggered or exacerbated other reasons that led to our project’s demise, because when money is involved, it slows down the development process due to how it can destroy relationships between team members, which was what happened in my science fair team. This selfish ambition that the leader had also engendered another reason for our project’s early failure: We took on too much work for our project. Specifically, us three high schoolers, with no professional biomedical engineering experience, had the goal of creating an “innovative”, comprehensive robotic spinal-surgical system.

Anyone with a hint of common sense, can guess that high schoolers, with no dedicated mentor, will be destined to fail in due time. But let me explain the story, and why I kept at this project despite the unreasonable odds.

The team leader, I’ll call him Mohan, is a very energetic Indian colleague, who seemed to be passionate about everything, but underneath the surface, his end goals are nothing but money and fame, the way I see it. The way he talks about his many different “startups” that he’s founding and how he’s applying to 1000 different internships every month exemplifies his intense desires, and his attitude about achievements and prestige were no different when it came to our science fair project.

I should specify that it wasn’t just me and Mohan in the project group (thankfully): there was another team member, I’ll call him Logan, and he seemed to grow more and more detached from Mohan as the project went on, and I took notice of this. When talking with Logan when Mohan wasn’t around, he would always say that the project ideas Mohan would try to push us towards developing was, frankly, impossible for high schoolers like us. I agreed with him, and yet, why did I still be a part of that team, and do every one of Mohan’s commands like a dog?

And I finally knew why: I wanted to be important.

There were often times in my robotics club where the “leads” we very busy with constructing, designing, cleaning, etc. to bat an eye to the other team members: my school’s robotics team consisted of over 40 people, and most of the time, only 10 of which would be contributing to the team, with the other members, me included, would be on the sidelines, with no work to do or not knowing how assist them, because there were “too many cooks in the kitchen”. I felt like an outcast.

Now back to my science fair project. There were only three members in the project: Mohan, Logan, and I, and with lots of work to be done, I felt this sense of false fulfillment whenever I stayed up past midnight on a school night on contributing to this project. “Me being tired only means I’m being more helpful!”

I had been so, so blinded by my distorted desires to contribute so much to a project that I thought was bigger than myself, ignoring the fact that the project was too big for us high schoolers to handle, and ignoring the sneaking suspicion that told me that this project was so big that it would blow up in our faces. And it did.

Fast-forward to today: on the bright side, I now know the ins and outs of how to train a machine learning model myself using Google Colab and from my computer, how to clean 3D (volumetric) data, and how to calibrate cameras in order to detect the position of an object in space, with the help of arUco or AprilTags. This experience had made me my insecurities about feeling “important” and presented me what would happend to myself if I were to continue listening to my unconscious self, telling me to work harder to be more seen, indispensable, even. I’m glad I had such a bad leader for this science fair project, because from now on, I will never place myself in the position of burning myself in order to keep others warm. Never again.

…Hopefully.

As a result, I’ll be taking a hiatus from making posts for you guys, as I’m currently still recharging from the science fair project and refocusing my efforts on other projects to present to you all, such as my Cybersecurity and AI-education initiatives. This hiatus should be no more than a month, so stay tuned!