House printing technology is something I aspire to work with in my career. It is a fairly new technology used by several different companies. It uses the same ideas as regular 3D printers, which I am familiar with. I have had and worked on several 3D printers since the age of 12, so I know how they work and how to take apart and repair them. The house printers take the Gcode used by regular 3D printers and upsize the machine size and output. It is a large printer that extrudes thick concrete into layers, forming a large structure. The process takes a few days total for printing and curing/solidifying, but the structure is a bare concrete wall in the shape of a small house. The structure still needs work like insulation, electric, and water sources but generally, it is a nice, cheap affordable home for those who need cheap housing. My goal after college education is to either join a company working towards or make my own company working towards the solution for cheap housing in order to help give homes to the homeless. I am excited for 3D house printers as they are hopefully my future, and a technology that will change the world of affordable housing.

I know college can be stressful with the workload being carried alongside living life with work, social life, and religion for some. I feel as if the Covid year of attending school offered some unique experiences that can act as an insight into what the life of a responsible adult is like. During the Covid year, a lot of the responsibilities of school and life were hoisted onto us young adults. I had to pick up so many extra responsibilities. A couple of examples would be me having to constantly babysit my little one-year-old nephew, I was handed more work and responsibility in my church community, and we students had to mature enough to make ourselves diligent with school. My sister had a child about 1.5 years ago. She works full time as a teacher so she isn't always home to take care of the son. Her husband is also out working most of the time so they often times leave their son, my nephew, with my family. This started right before covid and continued consistently throughout. I learned how to care for little ones and just how much hard work watching after and keeping safe a baby is. I would oftentimes have to put off assignments or even take care of my nephew during online virtual classes. He fussed and cried a lot until I gave him the attention he desired. It was difficult, to say the least. My church community, seeing me as a young adult also decided to give me some more church responsibilities. I was given the position of Assistant Sunday School Teacher in early 2020, and have been helping monthly. This has come with its own experiences such as handling toddlers and kids ranging from ages 4 to 12. I also acted as a temporary Acolyte when I wasn't teaching on Sundays. I was pressured into joining the music ministry team and now sing weekly in front of my whole congregation. The third and hardest thing to keep up with during the pandemic year was keeping up with the academic challenges of 11th grade. I took 5 AP courses that year in a heavily loaded charter school, BASIS. Rather than having my mother wake me up and take me to school in the morning, I was added the responsibility of waking myself up and making my own dietary restrictive meals. I powered through the quarantine years trying my best to not let myself get behind, by trying my best with every task handed to me. I find these tasks that all were handed off to me all in the same year are similar to the college level of responsibilities. At college, I will still have to participate in my church and visit my family to take care of my nephew, all while keeping myself academically responsible. With the experience of the Covid year, I feel better equipped to face both the challenges of college as well as the life of a young adult.

What is a home? As a military brat, my home was wherever the U.S. Military assigned my father to serve. I was born in the Florida panhandle, which was my home for only three years. But I have also called bases in Arizona, Louisiana, and Texas my home. The unfortunate reality for my early childhood was that my home didn’t include a consistent set of friends beyond my own family that I could continuously grow with. Luckily for me, my father retired when I was in middle school, and I was able to build a home in San Antonio for the last eight years, with the core of my community being at Three Streams Anglican Church. The church is a big part of my life, being raised by a military chaplain. I did not pay much attention as a child, but after becoming involved in a smaller church community, my understanding of what it means to be a Christian has grown. I have been encouraged to lead in ways that I was not comfortable doing at first because I am naturally an introvert. I began singing in the church music ministry group, teaching Sunday School to younger kids, and volunteering to help serve the people of nearby communities in need. For two summers before the global pandemic, I traveled over to Houston to serve people whose lives were hit hard by Hurricane Harvey. I helped repair damaged buildings, spent time with and comforted people with Down’s syndrome in an assisted living home, and distributed bags with food, water, and hygiene products to homeless people. At the end of the mission trip, I could not stop thinking about how vast the homelessness problem is, and how it puts into perspective all the warmth and protection I have been blessed with, in my own abode experiences. While handing out the supply baggies provided some relief, I have been inspired to research the issue for school projects, seeking to understand solutions. Unexpectedly, one of the most intriguing ideas to address the issue connects with my professional aspirations through one of my favorite hobbies: 3D printing. My experience with 3D printing began on my twelfth birthday. At that age, I was not expecting much more than the typical toys and clothes, so I was shocked when I received a Trinus 3D printer from my older brother. I had been intrigued by my brother’s stories of his own personal printers, but having my own was an exciting and new responsibility. I set up the printer with his help and started using it daily, finding cool new designs online, and fidgeting with software settings to improve the quality of the prints. While using this new skill to fix my own printer has been rewarding, it has also opened my mind to the possibilities of how I can help others. On a small scale, this is evident in the engineering classes I have taken in high school. I took the classes to learn about how to make CAD models and print them on our school’s four printers, but ironically, I have also become the school’s 3D printer mechanic, helping the teacher fix and explain the systems to other students. On a larger scale, I have been inspired to learn about how 3D printing can help the problem of homelessness. This technology is capable of making small houses with the basic necessities of living and at a significantly lower price. Seeing this connection, between a technology I feel a deep familiarity with and a real application, has made my career aspirations clear. Not only was the CAD experience eye-opening for how I could help others but it also proved to be fun. 3D designing is a form of art, where I can bring my ideas to life through hard work and dedication. An example of my creative and artistic ability is when my older brother and I thought up a new pokemon fusion. We had always discussed pokemon as it was one of our favorite childhood games that we still enjoy today. We always talked about fusions between pokemon and what they would look like and around the time when I got my 1st printer, I made my 1st pokemon model. I fused Charizard, Blastoise, and Venusaur, the three Kanto starters, naming it Charblastasaur. The 3D design does look a little funky, but it was a lot of fun to create this cool idea I had since childhood. I am inspired to seek out solutions for big issues like homelessness, and I am enthusiastic about the role that STEM professionals have in developing solutions. Working through the difficulties of maintaining a 3D printer has been a formative part of my youth, and learning to design in CAd has been fun and a cool way to express my thoughts and ideas, but I hope to grow even deeper in my knowledge of mechanical systems. My goal for the near future is to attain an engineering education and then advance technologies that can address large-scale issues like homelessness.