2014 Passion Project
⚠️ Warning
This project was created in Spring 2014 when I was 14 years old and in middle school. It is quite old now, and I was a different person back then. Therefore, please understand that there may be spelling and grammar mistakes. Additionally, the work may seem useless and flawed because the topic is very complex, and I was only a middle schooler at the time.
Backstory
It was Spring 2014, and I was finishing up the last remaining months of my middle school education. For our final project, to cap middle school, was the passion project. From what I remember, the passion project was a multi-month project where we were given the choice to pick a subject, research it, and present what we learned.
During this time, my dream/goal was to get into quantum physics and one day start a company where we could build and commercialize quantum computers. I’m not sure where this entrepreneurial dream came from, but it was always there in some form, even back then.
Knowing this and due to my drive to get into quantum physics, I decided that my passion project would be on the topic of Quantum Teleportation (QT). QT being the moving of quantum information from a sender to a receiver at different locations.
For this project, I went crazy. I remember spending hours per day just researching. Watching tens of hours of YouTube. Going to my local library to grab books on quantum physics and spending tens of hours reading those books. I also remember spending tens of hours browsing the web, mainly Wikipedia, to try to understand this complex topic.
During this time, I took pages of notes, mainly by hand. These notes were very detailed and nicely written. I am still proud of them to this day. I also invested a lot of time writing my paper and making my presentation.
After working on this project for weeks/months, my fellow classmates and I got to present our works to our teachers, parents, and fellow students. By the end of it, I remember getting an A on the project and carrying this passion for quantum physics into high school.
During high school, after taking a few physics classes, I realized that I was not really that good at physics. I could do it and I tried to enjoy it, but it was not natural for me. I would invest hours and hours trying to figure out complex topics only to see most of my classmates do the same thing in less than one hour. During this time, I also looked into how physics would work in college and determined that I was nowhere near good enough to excel in physics. Due to all of this and the fact that I got my first and only C in high school from the first semester of AP Physics C, I determined that I would not pursue quantum physics for my career. I think to really succeed in life, you have to do stuff you enjoy and that you are great at. I enjoy and respect physics, but I am not great at it. So during this time, I tried out mechanical engineering and then computer science in high school. To only settle and commit to computer science by the time I started college.
But this whole project was a great experience that I look fondly on to this day. It allowed me to start thinking about what I wanted to pursue career-wise very early on. It also allowed me to learn something cool and remind me how I like learning and building.
Content
notes.pdf
Notes I took while researching my topic. They were handwritten and scanned into a PDF.
essay.pdf
The final essay for the project that was submitted to my teacher for grading.
presentation.pdf
The PowerPoint presentation I created for our presentations.