I won an ASSIST full scholarship to spend one year of high school in California. This experience changed my life and one of my highlights was participating in the Team America Rocketry Challenge (TARC), my first engineering experience.
I spent a year living with a host family and attending a school in California thanks to an ASSIST full scholarship. At the start of the school year, I decided to start the first TARC team at Laguna Blanca School, and I was the head of the team 'Owls in space', made up of 10 students.
This was my first engineering experience where we designed, built, programmed and launched a model rocket that had to follow strict design requirements: it had to weigh 650 g and reach 800 ft in 42 s.
We used Arduino to incorporate an IoT device inside the rocket to measure other important variables such as temperature or pressure during our launches, to further improve our design.
Looking back, I remember it being both stressful and very fulfilling, and I am proud to say we ended up finalists! Go Owls!
