Personal Narrative: My Experience At The Summer Mentorship Program

Learning to succeed is the main focus that schools teach through the academic school year: in school and life. That's what's taught from elementary school to high school. During the summer of 2017 at The School of Engineering, I had to face obstacles that emerged from out of nowhere while also trying to build a functional robot. While working on the project, I was challenged and taught lessons that are not developed in basic studies. Teachers usually have an agenda for the day, but during my summer at the Summer Mentorship Program, I never had a straight agenda to follow but a due date to work for. Learning to solder in a day to frying a fretboard on the same day trained me to accept that failure was okay. Usually, one doesn’t think about failing because it just leads to more failure or brings down the whole idea of continuing but during my summer at Penn, I was not allowed to just give up after a little …show more content…
My partners over the summer allowed me to develop my social skills to work with others and be able to communicate with one another when an issue had arisen. Not only did we help each other build parts for the robot and help write lines of code, but actually spent time together as if we’ve known each other for years by spending lunch together to hanging out after program hours for a while. Traveling to Picatinny Arsenal and Princeton University to learn about the type of engineering work that is done, brought us together more and had wished there were more planned trips to go on. The long 3-4 hour long bus rides that felt like an eternity, but always had a great time getting to know one another, were the most memorable moments during my summer at the Summer Mentorship Program. With very few hours to work with, I strive that future students who decided to enter the program get an extra hour or so, together and get more time to be able to finish