Stanford Pre-Collegiate Summer Institutes

This summer, I have attended Stanford's Pre-Collegiate Summer Institutes and studied engineering for three weeks. The style of teaching was a lot different from that of my school back in Beijing mainly because of the way the lectures work and the rigor of the course. We studied different fields of engineering, and did many hands-on projects to reinforce our understanding of the subject. I think the most important lesson I learned was how to work as a team effectively with people from all over the world, and create a complicated machine that lifts half a pound of weight two feet up. I also liked the humorous teaching style of my professor, who frequently alluded his personal stories during lectures to make the class very engaging. The entire program was like real college life.

Stanford University's campus is one of the most beautiful ones I've seen, out of all the colleges I visited in the US. It is also my dream school.

What I also liked about the camp was that the afternoon is filled with different activities, such as sports, road trips, and various other recreational events. I liked ultimate frisbee the most, but each activity has its own fun.

What's funny about this summer program is that I was award this superlative:

The news department of my school was amazed by this award, and has asked me to write a post on my summer experience, which I have written in both English and Chinese. This post/interview sums up my two summer experiences. It was posted in BCIS NEWS, the official news department for the school. You can find it here. I'm proud of this so I strongly encourage you to check it out. But here is an extract from this interview in which I have addressed the question of "how did I get this award':

Before responding to this question, I must first stress that they weren’t serious when giving me this superlative. However, I’m not at all surprised because during the course of this summer program I’ve had the opportunity to tell them about my apps. In our residential group, we have a tradition called "Spotlight", where a few kids speak about their life stories to the rest every night. On my turn, I decided to impress them, so I listed some of the most powerful things I’ve done: cracking wifi passwords (with Kali Linux), getting free internet bandwidths from paid hotspots, even on airplanes (with my own app Universal Connector II), kicking people off a network (same app), encrypting & decrypting files and data using top-level security algorithms (Universal Encryptor), spamming people who don’t respond to me on WeChat and other social networks (Universal Spammer), Possibility Simulator for my grade 8-9 math class investigations, exploiting a loophole in the IB eAssessment app and reporting it to the IB), creating my own style of VPN (Universal Unblocker), a draft of the official BCIS app, and a couple more. By the end of my speech, everyone stood up and applauded, many with utter respect. They joked that I should become a professional hacker, even though I repeated many times that I never intentionally tried to hack; it was a coincidence that my apps turned out to have functions that sound like hacking. Since then, people sometimes enter my room and ask me to teach them coding or give them my apps, which was fun.

Anyways, the purpose of our engineering course was to create a Rube Goldberg Machine - a complicated machine that does a simple task - in two and a half weeks by using all the available materials that were provided. 8 step is required. In this particular task, the machine must be able to lift a 2 pound object up for at least two feet. After nearly twenty days of hard work, we have our completed machine:

#Stanford #CAS #SummerExperience