Koehler Family Trades and Engineering Scholarship

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” as Charles Dickens wrote in, A Tale of Two Cities. My story started six years before I was born when my parents had their first child, Annie. At that time my mom stopped teaching high school and stayed home to care for our family. Two brothers later and then I came into the world. Just before my birth, my mom started home-schooling my older siblings. In just a few short years, she taught me. Learning at home was the best; it allowed each of us to dive into deeper areas of interest while also learning the basic skills we needed to be successful in academics. School didn’t seem like school and we loved it. It was the best of times… My parents knew that at some point we would enter public school. For me fifth grade was the right time because of my love of music and wanting to be involved in band. For the next six years, it was the worst of times... School didn’t challenge me. It felt more like a factory than a learning institution; data in, data out. I truly missed the times when I could explore and move beyond the curriculum. Then everything changed! It happened in chemistry class. Everything I learned felt new-- like I was Prometheus. Except I wasn’t stealing the fire, I was making it. I would have happily sat in that class all day learning new things, doing new experiments, and figuring out how those experiments worked. This feeling only expanded when I entered advanced placement chemistry. We never repeated past learning but moved deeper into the weird parts of the world that I wanted to hear all about. Again I experienced the best of times. Through my teacher’s guidance I learned so much more. He had a “figure it out yourself” mindset when it came to learning, so we would spend all our time answering our own questions with only slight guidance about what to do. That type of investigative learning made me realize what science was all about. It is not just using some formula to answer a question that means nothing to you. It's all about using theoretical science to answer questions and solve problems in the real world that matter to you and the world. When you see acid melt something right in front of you, for example, you can only wonder how and why. It’s a similar feeling with nuclear physics. When I walked into my physics class and the board read, “Nuclear Physics,” I was instantly captivated. The very small has always fascinated me. When you look at tiny particles, things never work as you would expect them to work. Everything is always pushing and pulling on each other and it's one big mess. Learning about the forces in even a single atom makes the world feel controllable and less chaotic to me. In the first semester of my senior year, I attended the University of Wisconsin at River Falls. It has shown me the way to move forward in my education. At UWRF I took a neuroscience course. In that course I felt that I could never learn enough. The neurons in our brains are so complex and confusing that I could spend years learning about them. I now realize how much I want to learn and that I need to do it at a place where I can continue this journey, either UW-Madison or U of M-Minneapolis.

I am passionate about becoming an engineer because I get to create new things, solve problems and work together with a team. My uncle was an engineer and on every birthday he would get me some sort of building set. My favorite set was an electronic circuit kit where I could perform different actions on my circuit board like playing music and turning on different LEDs. I would spend hours making the different layouts they had in the directions booklet but then I would also come up with some of my very own and test my knowledge of the kit. This kit made me fall in love with creating new things and using my hand. I have lived on my family's beef farm my entire life. Many things come with living on a farm like learning responsibility and hard work. When equipment breaks down on the farm, I enjoy helping fix things and figuring out how they work. Working on the farm teaches me a lot about how things work and how it can be a time-consuming process. This has taught me to stay patient and not be afraid to ask questions when I need help because there are plenty of things to break on the farm if you don't know how to use them properly. One time I was at my Grandpa’s farm and my uncle and I were fixing his lawn mower. I was about ten years old and didn’t know much about fixing lawnmowers. My uncle had to run into town and pick up some parts we needed for the mower and he told me to try and figure out the problem on my own. He left me a manual for the mower and told me to try my hardest and try to learn as much as I could. I never figured out what was wrong with the mower but I loved learning a lot about the mower and how it worked in general. Another reason why I am passionate about engineering is I will be able to work with people every day for the rest of my life. One day, at a 4-H camp I used to go to when I was younger, my group was given the mission to build a stick tower that was as tall as we could make it and could hold a basketball. The group I was assigned to was creative but shy, so I felt like we needed a leader to help get our tower in the sky. The only rule in the contest was you could only use sticks from the nearby woods. I assigned half of our group to go to the woods and get sticks the other half would help build the tower. In the half-hour-long period, we ended up building a six-foot-tall tower and holding the basketball. This was some of the most fun I have had working with a team and I hope to build more awesome things in the future with a team of engineers.