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A portion of Joshua's winning essay:
The failure of my first experiment was as undeniable as the taste of smoke in my mouth. I had heard that heat purifies things, so, as a seven-year-old, I decided to build a “super-air purifier” – a contraption rigging pipes and a garden hose from a fire through a bucket of cold water. With my first breath of smoke, I realized that my career as an inventor would progress faster with an education, instead of reinventing catalytic converters one experiment at a time. My path into engineering was unconventional. Orphaned at the age of 4, I moved to a remote ranch in northern Mexico with my older siblings. The distances precluded attending school so my childhood was filled with rebuilding motors and tinkering with machinery. With the engineering skills and ingenuity of an 8 year old, I built a platform, mounted a grinder and motor and rigged a pulley on the grinder in order to grind cracked wheat for flour. Eating the fresh bread was the fruit of my first successful invention. An opportunity for formal education began when I attended school for the first time at age 15. Starting as a freshman high school student in Texas, I learned in four years what most students learned in twelve. During my high school years, in order to support myself, I built houses and a 1,800 square foot shop – from the pouring of the foundation to the electrical and plumbing installation. As the first person in my family to graduate high school and enter college, I pursued my dream of becoming an engineer. With my childhood “education” in repairing and inventing mechanical contraptions, I could immediately understand the applications of theoretical engineering concepts and their relevance to other fields. When learning new concepts in engineering, whether statics or C++, I knew the importance and applications of the principle even as the professor explained it to the class. With an extremely short formal schooling prior to college, I had difficulty adapting to the testing system in engineering in my early undergraduate years. My grades in engineering classes often did not reflect the ability that I had shown in the field or in discussions with my professors. My challenge lay in quickly reading and answering the test questions within the time limits.
Facing these challenges, although I did not attain my ultimate goal of receiving a degree in Mechanical Engineering, I had over fifty credits in engineering classes. After Arizona State, I co-founded Bella Donna Films (www.bdfilms.biz), an independent movie production company in 2002. As Chief Technology Officer, I directed movie crews of 10-20 people. All technical aspects of the movie production were my responsibility. I built the server and raid system and designed custom film equipment including inventing a jib that could move the camera in five axes. Due to the ingenuity of our equipment, we produced a full length feature film for under $50,000, while most independent film companies have budgets in the millions. Our work has been accepted at over 100 film festivals, including the Rotterdam International Film Festival, and has received over a dozen awards. While working with Bella Donna films, I developed a water testing project with a Stanford medical team in Papua New Guinea. Traveling 3 days by boat from the nearest football field that served as an airstrip, we were the first foreigners to reach some of the villages in the Sepik region, affectionately named “the End of the Earth”. Between the lack of electricity and buzzing mosquitoes, generating high quality data in this remote setting seemed impossible, but I developed field equipment for water testing, including a portable incubator, reconfiguring a 110 volts AC thermostat to run on 12 volt DC. I analyzed the data with parametric and nonparametric tests using SPSS, and anticipate on publishing the research. Based on this work, I was invited to be a key researcher on summer 2008 study researching water quality as a contributor to childhood diarrhea in Tanzania, and am currently designing and constructing new field equipment to suit our research needs. My ingenuity is especially valuable in low resource settings like the developing world, where materials are limited, or at a start-up company, where cost is an issue. My strengths lie in problem solving and streamlining processes for efficiency, and the modifications I create open possibilities to what was perceived as beyond reach. Now, eight years after concluding my initial studies in engineering, I am returning to complete my education in Mechanical Engineering. During the past year, I have refreshed my calculus and undergraduate engineering skills by taking courses at Foothill College as part time electives around my work schedule with an outstanding GPA.
This semester, I am currently enrolled as a full time student at San Jose State, and taking a full course load of engineering courses while applying for graduate programs. I have also done well on the GRE, proving to myself that I had conquered my challenges surrounding test taking abilities. Completing my training in Mechanical Engineering will complement my strengths by providing me with advanced theory and research skills for innovative design. I hope to learn how to build prototypes and create models for testing theoretical solutions. I also wish to engage in the methodology of engineering research and begin the process of inventing during my graduate studies. The skills that I can gain from further Engineering study would be invaluable to meet my career aspirations. I have pursued engineering for its own sake for as long as I can remember. It is what I do, no matter what else I am doing. Whether I am traveling or on holiday I continue to be an inventor and a designer. During my studies of Mechanical Engineering, whether I suck on the smoke of a failed experiment or design a novel process for Internal Combustion engines, it will lead to acquiring new knowledge and illuminating possibilities, not blindly walking around in a dark area where others already see.
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