"With just under 40 laps to go, Andrew Mibach is running way back in the pack. Throughout this race, he's constantly been on the radio with his pit crew, reminding them to stick to his track notes for this race. They have done so, and as a result, he's got nearly the same setup he had from earlier in the season when he won here. However, he was spun earlier by another driver, who didn't quite make the turn correctly. As a result, he's stuck back in 27th as the laps tick away. He's really going to need to communicate with his spotter, so he can navigate his way through this cluster of cars. This is where his reading and communication skills are going to be put to the test, as we close in on the end of the race."
As a kid, I was always fascinated with cars. Maybe it was because my father worked on them for a living, or maybe it was because of all the little Hot Wheels cars I had lying around in my room, I’m not sure. As I got older, I connected my interest in cars with my ability to do math somewhat well and my want to know how things worked, and decided that I wanted to work on cars for a living, like my dad. So, I declared as a Mechanical Engineering major for college.
I am also a really big sports fan, particularly the big 4 sports in the US (Football, Baseball, Basketball, and Hockey). Being a little kid in San Francisco, I gravitated towards the 49ers for football, the Giants for baseball, and the Sharks for hockey. It wasn’t until I moved up to Sacramento that I became interested in basketball. I remember when I moved up here in 2002, the Sacramento Kings were serious contenders for the championship that year, so I jumped onto the bandwagon. But, I would have to say my favorite sport is Auto Racing. Whether it is NASCAR, Indy Car, Drag Racing, or some endurance race, it doesn’t matter; if there's some racing going on somewhere, I will try to find a way to watch it.
My love of sports drove me to join my high school's football team in my sophomore year. At the time, I was really getting in to watching and playing football with friends. A few of my friends were actually on the team, which made me want to join, too. I also remember playing Madden Football on the Playstation, and winning games easily, which gave me the thought that actually playing football couldn't be too hard. Boy, was I wrong. I was trying out for quarterback, and one of the drills involved handing off the ball to the running back. When it was my turn, I wound up getting our biggest guy. Since I really had no idea what to do, I hiked the ball and turned around to hand it off. But, I had turned the wrong way, and ended up getting run over. Yeah, not as easy as I had originally thought.
Still, I stuck with it for the rest of high school, and I'm glad that I did. I got to know a lot of people around school, since football was really big because our teams were really good. As the years passed, I became more confident communicating with others. Before, I really wasn't very social at all, instead preferring to sit inside and play video games. After football, I was spending more time hanging out with friends. I was still kind of shy, and I still am today, but not nearly as bad as I was before I joined the football team.
As far as reading and writing go, I was always a good reader, since the time I was just a little kid. I would come home with great marks in the reading categories on tests, and my parents would always be so proud. I didn't really have a favorite kind of book to read until I was in the middle school to high school age. I had always known as a kid that I wasn't interested in the really fictional stuff, like the Harry Potter series. But it wasn't until I had read Band of Brothers by Stephen Ambrose and The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein that I realized what I was actually interested in, which would be historical biographies/accounts, or fictional stories that aren't too far from being reality.
The first book I can really remember being interested in was Band of Brothers. The story follows the story of the members of Easy Company, a group of paratroopers during World War II, from their military training all the way to the end of the war and their lives after the war. My interest in the book came from the TV miniseries of the same name came out. My parents would try to set up the VCR to record all of the episodes when they first came out in 2001, but because recording stuff from TV used to be a lot more complicated than it is today, we wound up missing one or two episodes. My parents would look for the episode they had missed before whenever there was a marathon of all the episodes on, so I sat down to watch with them one time. When I saw that we had the book, I took it off the shelf, blew the dust off, and sat down to start reading the book, and the more I read it, the more interested became in it. By the time I had finished the book, I had decided to keep it in my room, and it became mine.
In High School English, one of our assignments was to have a book to read throughout the semester, and write about it at the end of the semester. I picked up The Art of Racing in the Rain, since I thought from the title that it would actually be about racing. Instead, it follows one man’s struggle with his racing career and a custody battle, comparing his life to the difficulty of racing in the rain. Although it isn’t what I expected to be reading about when I picked it up, it has also found its way onto my shelf.
Reading these books hasn’t really impacted the way that I communicate too much. I feel that I am really straightforward when I communicate an idea, much like Ambrose is when he recounts the many tales of the soldiers in Band of Brothers. I will usually give some background information though, before I communicate the point. Occasionally I will try to mix in some humor, like Stein does in The Art of Racing in the Rain. But these books did change my perception of the world. By putting it into racing terms, I learned from The Art of Racing in the Rain that if you stay focused and don’t let outside happenings get under your skin and distract you , you can get through the difficult parts of life. From Band of Brothers, I gathered a similar idea; that to get to a goal, you will have to overcome many different obstacles that will come your way.
I still see reading playing a significant part in my future, both short-term and long-term. For my college education, being able to read and understand formulas and equations will be just as important as reading specifications and dimensions for designing and manufacturing a part if I want to graduate in Mechanical Engineering. If I were to get into the auto racing industry, there would definitely be a lot of reading to do. For example, reading track notes and setups from previous years and similar tracks would be an important factor in being able to set up a race car to have the best chance to win a race.
To conclude, reading, writing, and communicating all play a very important role in a mechanical engineer's life, as well as a race car driver's. Knowing how to get something done, and being able to analyze how something is done, take notes on it, and then communicate to others about it while being straightforward will help you to ultimately get the job done. I have learned these skills through playing high school football, and by reading books that didn't give anything unimportant to the plot. I am going to need to be able to use these skills in order to set myself up with the best opportunity to achieve a goal.
