College Admission Essay: Using Transitions Essay Example

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Below is an example of a college admission essay with transitions underlined.

I have built four completely functional robots to this day. As proud as I am of them, the focus of every one of my conversations dealing with robotics always revolves around the HMW#2, my disaster bot. It was built for my independent study course on robotic locomotion. The purpose of this bot was simply to move with the aid of four legs, but I set out to do much more than that. My intentions were to amaze and astound my mentors and even myself. The completion of the bot was meant to be my big accomplishment. It represented my mastery of motors, sensors, pics (programmable integrated circuits), and miscellaneous electronic components. Unlike the soporific act of memorizing Spanish vocabulary words, which I was never good at, building a robot requires creativity and intuition. I can actually remember drawing diagrams and schematics for the construction of the bot months before I even looked at my soldering iron. I was making sure that there would be absolutely no uncertainty about anything. It was supposed to be perfect.

Everything did, in fact, go perfectly according to plan. I completed the robot just a few days before it was due, and it was absolutely beautiful. It was capable of transportation by the method of flipping itself in all directions, responding to voice commands (with the help of Voice Direct by Sensory Inc.) and avoiding all foreign objects with its numerous infrared proximity detectors. For the next couple of days, I reveled in my accomplishment. On the night before my big presentation, I decided to give my creation an exhaustive test run to ensure that there were no bugs. Sure enough, there was one. I found that there are cases where the legs get caught on each other, resisting further movement. After forgetting to turn the robot off, I pulled each leg free from the others. By doing this, I managed to turn the servomotor towards its opposite direction while it was still operating. Apparently, this forced a current back up through the wires from which the motors were receiving their power. This current fried everything in its path and debilitated the pic. When I realized what I had done, I dropped a tear for the first time in a decade. This was the single biggest disappointment in my young engineering career.

After many disillusioned hours of confusion and panic, I was reminded that nothing comes without failure. As a future engineer, I had to comprehend the fact that failure means nothing if I don’t learn from it. What I took away from this project was a deeper knowledge of circuit design, servomotors, integrating microphones and speakers, soldering circuits, and the value of failure, all of which only come from hands-on experience. I later salvaged what I could for my presentation. I separated the voice command system to display the outputs to LEDs in place of the pins on the pic and I also implemented a few proximity detectors into circuits that make use of the unharmed motors. But more importantly, I was able to explain exactly what caused the bug and how to fix it. I displayed a new altered design of my robot that was now really perfect. Luckily I was not evaluated purely on the quality of my robot, but on my newly acquired knowledge as well. I am currently in the middle of rebuilding this bot, which I respectfully call the HMW#2-rev.II.