It is a late afternoon at Gunn High School, but while most high schoolers are finishing their homework, senior Jacob Chiu sits in the robotics room, formulating and making precise mathematical calculations in the design of his school’s First Robot Competition robot by using a MATLAB to find the correct size gear.
That drive, he says, wouldn’t have been possible without the encouragement of his engineering teacher, Mrs. Granlund.
“Mrs. Granlund is my favorite teacher,” Jacob said. “She is really dedicated to her work and spends lots of time outside of class for her students. She also gives us something adjacent to real life experience and advice in engineering. She encourages creativity and lets us do our own work.”
The freedom to explore more about engineering has driven him to great heights. After watching a video of someone melting zinc to make small objects, he was inspired to try it himself in his backyard. It was then that he realized engineering was something he wanted to pursue.
“I thought it was fun, so I kept doing it,” Jacob said.
When he first discovered casting early in high school years, it sparked a passion that would change his view of the future. For him, the summer isn’t about rest and leisure, but creating and designing a lathe machining curriculum for the students in the team.
Though starting off small, these projects gave him practice, experience, and most importantly the confidence to complete his dream project: a die filer that can move a rough, toothed tool up and down very quickly to cut out complex shapes.
His advice to people exploring new hobbies is to “start off slow and work with the materials you have. If you put too much energy and resources into it, it becomes easy to lose interest.”
That philosophy has shaped how he approaches not just engineering, but life.
He is proud of games he’d recreate in his freetime, like poker, Zheng Shangyou, as well as the 24 puzzle which shows his idea of a fun time.
Teens of Bay Area 
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