At my school we have CTE’s(Career Technical Education classes) for sophomore through senior year and exploratory for the freshman year. They have four exploratory classes that teach you about the different CTE’s in each one. My freshman year was not a normal freshman year like most of my peers had because I was having health problems and family issues so naturally my exploratory experience was very different for me compared to the other kids I am graduating with this year. My very last exploratory rotation I met a teacher that made a really big impact on me from the start and still does whenever I see her. I don’t always get to talk to her but every once in a while when I do I talk with her she always offers to help out if I need anything and I am really glad I was able to have her as a teacher. During my freshman year she had told me to continue sticking with the things I like and to continue chasing my dream of working for Disney because no matter what happens I should always stick with what I want to do and not what others think I should do. She then continued to help me through sophomore and junior year and I also had her write me a recommendation letter that I wasn’t able to use because my guidance counselor lost it. Even though she currently isn’t my teacher she always offers to help me find scholarships or even if I need help with my resume or finding a good job. It is very rare for many students to have a genuine teacher like her and I consider myself very lucky to have had her as a teacher and mentor of sorts. With her insight I have always worked on making sure I follow my dreams and have worked on many scholarships and always tell her about any new info that I have gotten whether it’s about the college I’m going to or about the scholarships I’ve been applying to. I love being able to see her and talk to her but I am sad that once I graduate I won’t be able to see her anymore unless I visit the school. One cool thing that I am going to do before I graduate is write a letter to her on how she has impacted my high school career, knowing I will be able to do this I can’t wait to write it.

The movie that has had the greatest impact on my life is between Tomorrowland and Meet the Robinsons. Both of these movies have a focus on the future and engineering and making things to better the future. I always loved these two movies and always go back to them because of what I like to do and what I want to do for a job. Both movies were created by the Disney company and are reasons I look forward to becoming an engineer and hopefully work for Disney as a ride or robotics engineer. In the movie Tomorrowland, certain characters go to a ride that is based on the ride It’s a Small World and also has an element of what the New York World’s fair was like that Walt Disney himself took It’s a Small World to. Now, Meet the Robinsons has a kid that always was creating different inventions and even though they didn’t work he always kept trying. One of his inventions was a memory scanner, he was making it so he could try and find someone that would know something about the blurry image he had of his mother. Both of these movies taught me about different types of innovation and also taught me lessons that can help me now and in the future. I always loved these movies because I have grew up with them with Meet the Robinsons coming out the year I was born and Tomorrowland coming out in 2015 when I was 8. My family would always watch the movies and since we were a big Disney family and went to the Florida parks many times since I was thee or four. Growing up I always loved watching the rides move and I loved building things. With watching the movies I then also grew a habit of drawing different ideas of inventions that I had wanted to make when I was younger. Of course now looking at these inventions that I came up with when I was younger I know they probably won’t work but I always wanted to try. Now though I’m a senior in a high school where we were able to pick a Career Technical Education class or CTE and naturally I picked Pre-Engineering and am now getting ready to go to college for Mechanical Engineering at my top school. Through these movies I learned to love all things engineering and can’t wait to learn more and hope more kids see these movies and grow a love for engineering too.

I am a senior in high school, and at my school we have something called CTE’s(Career Technical Education) classes and I’m in a Pre-Engineering CTE. In my class there are only two students, including me and I am the only female student in the senior Pre-Engineering CTE class. Originally, we had more students, but two of the students switched to another CTE, and the other one switched to another school. Having fewer students is nicer because it’s easier for us to do projects and work together. It is also nice because we get to help out the younger students when we do events. Being in the Pre-Engineering CTE helped me decide what section of engineering I wanted to do and choose which college had the major. The major I wound up choosing was Mechanical Engineering and with the major I hope to work at Disney World and help build and design new rides and make or create animatronics for the parks to bring kids that come there happiness and be able to see them enjoy the rides that I have enjoyed since I was a kid. The main reason I want to work at Disney is because ever since I was younger I always was interested in the ride mechanics, for example on the magic carpet ride for Jasmine and Aladdin and the Dumbo ride I would always look towards the center where all the ride arms connected to and would watch the arms move as the ride moved. This interest led me to like building legos, especially the car lego sets because you were able to move the cars around and I also started a collection of RC cars that I still love to drive around. I’ve always wanted to work at Disney but what I wanted to do as a job changed a couple times but now that I know more about engineering and have learned about lots of different engineers that work for the Disney company and have watched many videos of how the engineers have built the rides I now know I want to be an engineer for them. As a senior in pre-engineering, we had to do two senior projects. The first one I chose was to research all the problems with Halloween masks and redesign one using 3D printing so that those problems that I found wouldn’t cause those problems. When it came to the time when we had to pick our second project one of my original ideas before we switched to something else was to make a working 3D Printed ride model of one of two Disney rides, either Hollywood Tower of Terror or the Mad Tea Party spinning cups ride. We wound up switching to do a project for our school and created a Pre-Engineering Makerspace website and order form that students and teachers will be able to use during the next school year. This project helped us learn responsibility with certain requirements and how to work with outside sources.

Legos may not mean a lot to some people but to me, it is one of the key factors of who I am and who I’ve grown to be. Growing up I always asked for legos whether it was for my birthday or Christmas. Legos were always something I enjoyed building with my sister at our dinner table and little did I know that a love for Disney World and a growing lego obsession would join to be what I want to do in the future. As I got older I continued to build legos and my family went to Disney World. While being in the parks I always would look at how the ride was working and try to figure them out. Just like with legos, there are parts you wouldn’t think would do what they do. After thinking about this I started getting more into the harder to build legos that had more difficult pieces and I also started gaining interest in robots. My sister and I would always build our legos together and we would pretend that we were builders and that’s when I would come up with different ideas of inventions. This interest I had gained in coming up with inventions and learning how things worked led me to start taking a liking to similar things to robots which led me to find RC cars. I started getting a couple of RC cars for my birthday and also would get some from my neighbors and would race my sister around our yard with the cars. So while continuing to have an interest in legos, robots, and now RC cars, I continued to try and learn more about how rides at amusement parks worked and how they were connected to robots and machines. When I got around 6th grade my STEM class was introduced to VEX kits which at that point was something that I hadn’t heard of before. So while I had Stem I started making different like a vex crane, a lever, a car, and some other small things. When I got to junior high (7-8th grade) I realized that I wanted to work at Disney World but instead making the rides (I had wanted to work at Disney before that but it was always for something else). This idea came up when my sister got an invitation to Cape May Tech’s open house to which we all went and that’s where I learned about the Engineering CTE program which is how I realized that all of these past experiences were shaping me into a future engineer. After that, I went on to go to Cape May Tech with the knowledge of what CTE I already wanted to be in where most kids were coming in not knowing what they wanted to do and I already had it figured out. I knew I wanted to be in Engineering because of the research I had done to learn about who made the rides at the Disney parks. I love being in my engineering class and I love learning new things about robotics and the mechanics of the rides both at Disney and other amusement parks. I also have grown to realize that I want to stick with it because of how long it’s been that I was interested in it and how much it makes me happy to learn more about it. When I’m building something for my Engineering class like a robot or a 3D-printed Iron Man helmet I always think back on starting out building lego sets.