This past Saturday, I volunteered at the Triangle Regional NC Science Olympiad competition at Garner High School. My fraternity brother got me acquainted with the event, and I loved it so much the first time, I decided to volunteer a second year.

I helped with two events. One of them was called “Mission Possible”, where the kids brought in and demonstrated machines they had built, which would start with the drop of a golf ball and end with raising a flag. Sounds simple, until you factor in the other 8 tasks that had to be performed during the course of the machine’s operation for a maximum score, and a constraint for the maximum physical dimensions of the machine. It never ceases to surprise me how gifted these kids are.

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I came up with some stanzas of poetry for a presentation for African-American literature. The presentation was on Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance, so the idea was to adapt one of his poems to better reflect the present-day era.

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