HTMMA Vingettes

POLS

Three little letters are all they are, P.O.L, stands for Presentation of Learning, but there is so much more. You truly only spend a few days on them, so someone new may say, “What’s the big deal?” However your whole pass/fail of the grade rides on whether you pass or fail you POL, that means that they decide whether you go to summer school. Those are two words that should never be together.
Then to top that all off they throw this at you, there are not one but two POLs during the course of the year, that means that you have to dodge not one but two bullets. Luckily they are spaced apart quite far, so you have time to recover and face the next one.

Aviation Intersession

Two full weeks away from school (well sort of, we were still technically in school), sounds like heaven doesn’t it. Well it was. We did have to learn stuff thou, but don’t get it wrong it was still fun, and definitely not boring.
We started out at school and learned about lift and other basic principals of flight (and demonstrating them by making paper and model airplanes, at school, how cool is that). Then we went to the Aerospace museum in Balboa Park for the rest of the time and did tours and for to sit and do classes in the Board of Directors room. That room was cool, it had these huge leather swivel chairs that I swear must have had a mild sedative in them, because as soon as you sat down in them you would start to fall asleep, even if you were wide awake a moment before.
We also built and launched model rockets at Fiesta Island for the day (very cool, some went 1000 feet high!) The final day was the best of all, because we got to go flying in a real Cessna. It only sat 2-3 people and was a lot bumpier than the big planes, but that made it all the more fun. At some points it felt like you were free falling because you dropped so fast. But at the end of that day, unfortunately, it was time to say goodbye, and head back to normal school, (but not until after two weeks of spring break!)

20 Years from now

I went to High Tech High for high school, I chose to go to this school instead of High Tech High International, or High Tech High Media Arts because High Tech High was more based around technology and robotics, which I was (and still am) very interested in. During high school I finally built one of my inventions (I had an invention book where I wrote down all my inventions I though up). The first one I built (built at home) was this invention I thought up when I was playing one of my favorite video games (at the time) Mega Man. He had this really cool armor on and it had a blaster that shot different sized/powerful bolts so I thought, why not make a squirt gun version of his blaster (and eventually the whole armor). So I made a crude looking blaster attached to a big water tank strapped to my back, but that thing was the coolest, because it was able to shoot small bursts of water at incredible speeds. It was also able to propel large amounts of water at a fairly good clip. I then went on to complete high school and get my diploma, then straight off to college.

College was fairly uneventful I studied for my Bachelor’s degree in engineering (so I could better be able to make my inventions). While I was at college I tinkered with various inventions and thought up some new ones, but waited till I was out of college to build them (in case my college tried to use their intellectual property agreement against me and try to profit off of my ideas).

My early career years were quite interesting however, I was a struggling entrepreneur in the business world, trying to start my own company to sell my inventions and other fellow inventor’s as well (if they were willing). I also worked part time as an engineer (until I secured a location for my company). It was quite jumpy in those first few years, but I finally secured a location in California and was finally starting to sell things under my inventions under my company name Gravi, which means that the inventions have to do with gravity or use gravity in some way. When it just started I had the water gun armor displayed in the window, with its gleaming metal exterior and its high power water gun, I also spiffed up the shop and made everything sparkly clean. Once that was set done I started advertising and once the word got out people really started to come in. So once Gravi was -established I bought another lot in the same area and started a new division of Gravi, Anti-Gravi, which makes things that defy gravity or just don’t use it. Then when I had enough money, I bought a warehouse to start mass-producing my inventions. From there on Gravi just kept growing and I bought more stores and more warehouses to keep up with the demand, and got to were I am today, the owner of a multimillion dollar company. And I owe it all to my mom and dad for challenging me and supporting me to make me the creative person I am today.

My favorite memory from the past 20 years was the memory of when I finally got my first invention to work. My other favorite memory is that of when I first met my wife, Katie, we met while I was working part time as an engineer and was struggling to secure a location for my company. We worked in the same building so we saw each other quite a lot, but my attraction to her didn’t really happen until I got moved into the cubicle next to her. We got married 1 year after that and now have two rambunctious little boys. I have made the world a better place because I made products (from Gravi) that encouraged kids to once again play for real, not just in video games.