For the second semester of my senior year, I'm so very happy to be finally done with all of my college apps! I ended up applying to 12 schools. I'm genuinely proud of all of the effort I put in during the first semester of my senior year to complete my college applications, and I can wholeheartedly say that the essays I submitted were the strongest essays I could have possibly produced. However, in retrospect, I realize that I wasted a lot of time during my first three years of high school, especially during COVID. I should've taken more courses at SMC and expanded my extracurricular resume with more impressive accomplishments. Not only would this have significantly increased my chances to get into a top college, it would have also given me a head-start in preparing for my future career in engineering. Thus, I'm most excited to use my senior year to improve my resume, so I can build useful skills and achieve high-level internships during college. Specifically, I've joined a new research project at UCLA and working on quantifying the heat transfer performance of oscillating heat pipes, designing my own python course that I will sell online, applying for 100+ NASA internships, applying for a $40,000 Amazon scholarship that also comes with a paid internship at the company, starting a 3D modeling business on Fiverr, exercising more often, reading for an hour a day, and...of course...coding an app/chrome to replace Aeries. With respect to the capstone project, the greatest obstacle my group will face is learning all the different coding languages required to program an app. We are also worried that our app may end up being slower than the Aeries app if we get hundreds of downloads because we won't have a dedicated server.
Products made for profit are designed to maximize the net money earned from consumers, whereas products made to benefit others are designed to maximize social impact. Products that are made for profit are often more efficient and effective compared to products that are made to benefit others. This is because people who make products for profit are incentivized to make them as efficient and effective as possible to maximize their profit. On the other hand, there isn't as much of an incentive to make super efficient and effective products that are solely designed to help others; products made to benefit others usually aren't scalable because there aren't enough resources to expand its use. Usually, the best engineers and scientists work for for-profit companies. Additionally, products that are made for profit aren't necessarily built to last; they have planned obsolescence so that consumers can purchase a new product when their old product dies, which allows companies to make more money. Products made for profit can sometimes be ethically questionable, and also harm the environment. An example of a product made for profit is an iPhone. An example of a product made to benefit others is a wheelchair made by a non-profit organization.
