Most people who think about sustainable design think about materials: recycled plastics, biodegradable packaging, lower-emission manufacturing. I think about waste. Specifically, I think about all the energy and potential sitting unused in systems we already have, and what it would take to actually use it. That instinct has shaped two projects I built during high school, and it is the same instinct I plan to bring into mechanical engineering. The first came from something small I kept noticing. After sitting in a chair for a while, the seat is warm when you stand up. That heat, generated constantly by the human body, just disappears. So I built ThermoCharge: a seat that embeds thermoelectric generators beneath a foam-and-linen cushion and converts the temperature difference between a person's body and the surrounding air into stored electrical energy. No external power source, no moving parts, nothing added to the environment. The energy any single seat produces is modest. But in a bus terminal, an airport, a school full of classrooms, the same quiet process is happening in hundreds of seats at once. That is the part that interests me most about sustainable design: the difference between what a single solution produces and what it produces at scale. The second project started with a much larger kind of waste. During Hurricane Katrina, more than 40 helicopters flew around the clock across 150 square miles of flooded terrain and still left survivors undetected. Helicopters are expensive, slow to coordinate, and stretch rescue teams thin under already brutal conditions. I designed HADES: an autonomous drone with a high-resolution camera and an AI object-detection model capable of identifying survivors from the air in real time. A coordinated fleet could survey the same area faster and at far lower cost, without putting additional crew members in danger. This project taught me that sustainability is not only about the environment. It is about building systems that hold up when they are needed most and do not exhaust the people or resources behind them. Both projects began the same way: by looking at something inefficient and asking whether it had to be. Wasted body heat does not have to be wasted. An undercovered disaster zone does not have to stay that way. In both cases, the most meaningful design decision was not what to build, but what to pay attention to in the first place. That is the engineer I am trying to become. Not someone who arrives with a solution already in hand, but someone who looks at a system carefully enough to see where it is losing something, and disciplined enough to do something about it. Sustainability, to me, is less a design constraint and more a habit of attention. I plan to carry it into every project I work on.