Comparing Two Scientific Accomplishments

When assembling a résumé or CV, it is important to consider one’s successes in both academic and personal pursuits to demonstrate a variety of technical skills and a sense of dedication to employers. Personally, I am interested in pursuing a career in the sciences -- specifically, software engineering -- so this essay will discuss two scientific achievements. First, in 2013, a partner and I earned first place in the prestigious TanenbaumCHAT Science Fair, to which every Jewish school in Toronto can only send three participants. Although the reward was approximately as small as the seventh-grade students who reaped it, I felt thoroughly achieved; it was an early sign for me that my interest in science could turn into a rewarding career. Earlier

Over the course of each year, students are required to develop and present a detailed and complex scientific project including logbooking, lab reports and, of course, decorated trifold cardboard. In grade seven, the Science Fair process focuses on formulating a hypothesis, planning a scientifically rigorous experiment to test it,, and reporting whether or not gathered data supports it. Following my ongoing passion for astrophysics, my partner and I decided to postulate that attaching fins to a model rocket in radices of two would afford a proportional increase in maximum altitude. Before long, we had assembled an Estes Big Bertha rocket with two balsa fins. In order to measure how high our rocket flew, we also purchased an altimeter and designed a custom bubble-wrap-filled payload bay to accommodate it. Over the course of four cold winter months, we launched the rocket nine times - three with two fins, three with the traditional four, and three with an intimidating-looking eight. The data the altimeter provided was incredible: we could notice patterns emerging even during note-taking. Ultimately, the meticulous lab report and presentation we provided impressed our teacher sufficiently to send us to CHAT as competitors. After five hours of presenting before a panel of judges and another nail-biting hour of deliberation, our project was selected to earn first prize:

I was first able to participate in a computer science course in grade nine, and I instantly fell in love. Unsatisfied with the unpowerful Turing, I spent the following summer learning Python (much to Ms. Dyke’s chagrin), a highly-employable skill of which I am very proud. I was able to put my unique ability to use in late January, when a team of Mackenzie students, myself included, took home four twenty-dollar (U.S. dollars!) Amazon gift cards at DataHacks 2016. Every project, colloquially known as a “hack”, must parse large amounts of data from any source and converting it into useful information. Judges were looking for unique and innovative ideas, as well as solid implementation. Once teams were allowed to assemble and begin planning, I proposed making a program that finds the average colour of every frame in a movie, then visualizing each colour as a stripe in a barcode of sorts representing the movie. With the images the program produced, one could investigate difference in colour schemes between genres of movies, whether emotional scenes in the movie had higher concentrations of a colour, and more. In order to finish the hack in the three hours allotted, we decided to create three smaller programs with specific functions, in three different languages. First, a Java application converts every pixel to an RGB value and calculate the average value. Then, a Turing