2022. The Epic Saga.
So what exactly was I up to this year?
Well. I’ll admit, I’m just straight up ripping this format off of Juan David Campolargo.
But hey, imitation is the ultimate form of admiration.
Well, 2022 was a huge year for me. I totally changed in so many different ways, it’s really beneficial to sit down, write about the year, and just simply process everything that happened this year.
In summary, things really changed for me in the last 5 ish months of the year, when I moved out and really spread my wings. This hoonigan level of freedom is really working wonders for me.
An overview:
Graduated high school
Moved out!
Went to college first semester
Built my rocket engine test stand
Built a mini makerspace ( expanding rapidly)
Started boxing/lifting/taking better care of myself
The list seems short, but there was simply so much to each of these and other small things that made this year the best year of my life. Initially I wanted to do a month by month breakdown, but it was pretty uninspiring so I scrapped it and started over.
Wrapping up high school.
Senior year was really great, it was a totally drastic departure from all my previous years. I used to be an absolute academic hellhound, taking the most difficult math and science classes mostly out of spite and to have an interesting time, but I had ran out of classes to take by senior year, so I just wound up taking a bunch of shop and hands on classes. Best decision I ever made.
I took Digital Electronics, ISM ( independent study and mentorship), Metal shop 3/4 ( I had a chat with the teacher and it worked out to shove me in the highest level class), and woodshop. I spent a lot less time doing homework and a lot more time just building things. Truly a liberating experience. First half of senior year was a lot of fun, but the second half was really something special. I was quite prolific with my projects so here’s some of the things I built/tested in my last semester in high school:
A ‘house‘ lamp
A table
A small Chinese Treasure Ship
Helped with Animatronic Monkey project
Finished welding up my test stand’s basic structure
Had my tanks welded up and proceeded to explode them
Built a basic DAQ out of an Arduino ( sort of failed)
Helped build a (different) trailer/ Took it to show and made drawings for it.
Assembled some cow pens
Built some massive wooden planters for a community garden.
Did some fence welding
Welded a weird artistic turtle.
Fixed up my car.
Built a crappy water gun out of my hydrostatic pump.
Honorable mentions for things I did:
Wrangled a cow
Tried to get an internship at a company building space balloons at KSC. Failed.
Ran Engineering Club.
Skipped class to go hang with the cows at the barn.
Skipped a LOT of class.
If it wasn’t obvious already, I REALLY like to build things. It’s my thing, my signature move. Anything that interferes with that is the quickest and easiest way to provoke me (foreshadowing).
What was really notable was that my high school had one of the best engineering programs and labs in the nation. We had a giant welding shop, an equally large woodshop, and a small dedicated engineering room, in addition to a small robotics room, which were both chock full of interesting things.
And. This was Texas.
The land of the free.
You might ask, how did they let me build my rocket engine at school. Did you do it secretly? No, not really. They didn’t care. The assistant principals found out about my shenanigans when a person who I cold emailed to help me fire my engine freaked out ( unjustifiably ), described my work as equal parts ‘very impressive and very concerning‘, told me to stop immediately and tried to stop me, emailing my school principals, who after interviewing me, gave me some candy and told me to go about my merry way.
I won’t dwell too long on that encounter, but the point I’m trying to make is, the school was well aware of what I did, and did not care, because nothing I did ever hurt anybody. I’m very very well aware of the dangers and only do the most benign of testing at school. The real dangerous bits are done in the middle of a clay mine outside of Houston with several hundred feet of cleared ground and plenty of space and experienced people watching my back.
Generally, all the teachers that were in the ….. ‘building things‘ department really really liked me and gave me plenty of leeway to work on my own thing and use their resources. I basically all but ran the three shops we had.
To elaborate on these projects:
The lamp: Originally my woodshop teacher said to build a house lamp. I thought long and hard about what I wanted to build and defaulted to building a pun. A ‘House‘ Lamp. Everybody who I’ve told that joke to has cringed at me, but really fell in love with the final result. It taught me the importance of processing wood, the ease with which things can be created with a bit of planning, and proper processing of wood. 10/10 project. Staircase was the hardest part.
The table project was just a really basic wooden table. I felt overwhelmed by complexity on my recent projects, and wanted to challenge myself by building something simple, but doing it really really well. And I definitely achieved that goal, but it wasn’t that unique of a table. It didn’t have that classic level of ‘Ismail Creativity’ and for that I give it a 6/10. It wasn’t special, but granted it was a really good worktable. A part of me wishes I still kept it.
Chinese Treasure Ship. OKAY this was a REALLY fun project. It started off in the most hilarious way too. So I had this competition of mine that I had really liked to compete in in high school. I started in freshman year, built a bespoke double decker train and made it to nationals, but I didn’t win. Now the rules of the competition allowed me to make something totally unique, something totally custom designed, and that was a really big part of what I liked about this competition. This was all under TSA ( Technology Student Association) and specifically the Transportation Modeling event.
I really liked the competition and the following year the theme was to build a moon or mars lander. I LOVED that. So I designed the sickest and coolest lander, won the regional competition and then everything after that got canceled due to covid. I was totally convinced that with my level of work, I would have won nationals. Can’t find the pictures of the real thing, but it was really good looking. It’s sitting mostly finished in a box somewhere at my high school.
And then the next year, they took out my favorite part of the competition. They basically disallowed bespoke designs, and said to focus on building some historic jet. I flipped out, refused to do the competition and directed my attention elsewhere. My friend from middle school built a sr-71 model and won nationals.
I was livid lmao. I was so pissed about it because the ONE year, that I don’t do it, he builds something and wins nationals. Obviously kudos to him, but my ego couldn’t handle that. For a while my ego kept quiet, but it was definitely lurking.
So then when senior year rolls around, I didn’t initially do the competition until I went to state in April, saw my competitors’ projects and thought, these are all absolute dogshit, I could do way better, so I exploited a loophole in the rules which let me build ( essentially a custom designed boat) based off of an ancient Chinese treasure ship. I spent almost zero time on design and just hit the woodshop, within about a week, I had something resembling a boat, and finished the whole project roughly within a month of school. The last month of school actually. Then. My dumb self didn’t write a portfolio, so I never submitted it to the competition. But it was SO much fun to build and always a fun story to tell. 9/10 project, -1 because I didn’t submit it. I was also one of 2 people in the nation who built a ship for that competition smh. Granted. It wasn’t perfect, but it was very very unique.
My friends were working on animatronic monkey, the story of which is a long and honestly a boring drama, I initially halfway built a dragon, we didn’t wind up using it, teams fell apart, I wound up joining monkey team, which was too little too late. 2/10 project. But it led to a lot of personal growth for the involved parties.
Pop.
In January of 2022, I didn’t have much going on, I had just wrapped up first semester of senior year, which was my absolute favorite year of high school, solely for the reason that it had been mostly spent in shops, barns, labs and outside the classroom.
I detest classrooms. I believe it’s such a horribly unhuman way to teach things. It has it’s time and place, but I disapprove highly of it being the one-size-fits-all approach it has to education. Maybe I’m biased because I like to go outside and do things, not just watch a lecture. But I suspect that a huge percentage of the population is with me on this.
Anyways, it’s January 2022, I got sick during the break and soon into the month we returned to school. I don’t recall much about school, except what’s left in my photo album, which shows a ( third and different) trailer we finished building in metal fab shop. I helped out on various odds and ends on this trailer, but my main project in that class was building my test stand. Oddly enough, my metal shop teacher didn’t care much what I did, he approved of it for sure. I think it was a really valuable experience as it helped me grow my fabrication skills significantly. Granted, not that they are any good right now, but they are a ton better than they used to be.
One of my other classes in this semester was a Digital Electronics class. We basically wired breadboards and spent a lot of time in MultiSim. I really liked the teacher, but soon realized I found digital electronics incredibly boring, so I’d constantly sneak off to my lab to work on various other projects. It was only when given something to fiddle with that I was interested in that class. Soldering was my favorite section, it was so funny to see the really sheltered academic kids freak out about it. Then we’d help them and everybody would be okay.
At this time, I had received my hydraulic pump for my hydrostatic test rig for tank pressure testing, so I was beginning to put together the fitting stack for that. I remember at this time, I didn’t yet have a car, so I’d always convince one of my friends during engineering club after school to drive me to the hydraulic store. Most of them agreed on the premises that adventuring in general was good and fun. Spoiler alert, it sure was. We all had a blast.
There’s an old video of me cycling a valve somewhere, just playing with hardware and putting together my basic test stand. It was at this time just the basic structure, and I did it all wrong anyways so I pretty much had to redo just about everything, maybe 3-4 times. Funny how that works. Almost nothing on that initial stand made it onto the trailer except the actual structure, which got chopped and modified significantly.
The biggest thing I had going on at this time was my very first hydrostatic testing. I kid you not, I failed in just the setup so many different times. A single successful test took me maybe 3-4 attempts to start with. Various issues plagued my system including leaks ( a constant of plumbing), just poor logistics in general, and being plagued by my own stupidity in addition to having an electronics system be not trustworthy. I had finished up wiring my harness for the pressure transducer and wired it directly to an Arduino - totally horribly system but it worked, albeit not great. I scrapped it, went back to using pressure gauges like a caveman and opted simply for double redundancy.
When I got my first pressure test done and building pressure, my tank popped. It failed right at the weld. I remember screaming obscenities at the school parking lot which were almost as loud as the pop itself. It’s like opening a tin can all at once, audio wise. This was my first big failure of the year. I had gotten these tanks welded the month prior but the welds just weren’t consistent all around, and wound up splitting because they hadn’t achieved full penetration everywhere on the tank wall.
I remember just sitting there, devastated. A solid several months of waiting on these stupid tanks to be finished, and now the first one pops. And at 200psi to tops? I was livid. But also just really sad and disappointed.
Recovery
In the following 48 hours I learned more about weld engineering than combined in the 2 years prior. Nothing like a failure to teach you what you messed up. It’s honestly an incredibly mechanism. Basically, what had happened was there was uneven heating of the tank because the bulkhead had a lot more thermal mass than the tank wall, simply put because the concentration of material near the weld is higher on the bulkhead side of things, so it sucks heat away from the weld, leaving the weld colder than it should be, and preventing it from achieving full penetration.
Full penetration is when you have filler material reach all the way to the other side of your material. So if you are welding on the outside of the tank, you want to see the weld material on the inside of the tank with a borescope. I would have known this had I done a dye test, but I stupidly decided not to. Oh well.
So with the weld being colder than it should ( with the welder settings turned up to max), there was not full penetration all around, which created weak spots, which concentrate the pressure and lower your pressure rating significantly.
Burst for these tanks should have been around 1200psi. The first one burst at 200, the second at around 350psi, and the third one started yielding at 300psi. Yielding in this case is referring to material elongation meaning the tank is bulging. This is of course natural, but it should be linear bulging. Linear being defined with pressure rise with respect to strokes on the hand pump. When this was not the case, it was clear that something was beginning to fail, and I stopped the test. I figured, enough damage done. I know not to use the tank, lesson learned.
These tests were the ultimate shenanigans of January Ismail. I was performing them in the school parking lot, behind the school, for the most part with a few friends for help. I’d drag them out of class ( for the most part nobody was doing anything) and we’d go out there and blow up tanks. I tended to do them after school, but setup for the tests took several hours, mostly because I didn’t know what I was doing and had to leak test everything every single time I set up. Doing a test then was a several hour commitment since I had to fill up buckets of water, then fill up the tank, the move everything out there, then begin leak testing, and debug whatever pops up. I’m probably going to rebuild the hydro pump setup later, it’s ridiculous how much better I can now build it.
For those of you building your own setups, it’s not something to emulate. Talk to me and I’ll show you what I’d fix During this time I did a lot of wiring for the rocket, it was one of the first few months with actual things to do hands on with the project, so it was a ton of fun.
Regarding the failure and my emotional state. I was a total miserable wreck for about two days the first time around and still sad about it a week later. But the next time something failed, I just laughed and got back to work 15 minutes later. Failure hardens the soul.
During this time, I started playing around with bending tubing, and plumbed my engine ( incorrectly) for the first time. Uneven pressure drops on opposite side of the fuel inlets were going to be a problem and have since been fixed.
In other news, we went to a county show for trailers and FFA ( Future Farmers of America) projects where I saw some really cool trailers but and projects, unfortunately didn’t meet as many cool people as I’d have wanted to. Then it wasn’t a priority, because I hadn’t yet realized the value in cool people congregations like that. I wish I had spent more time talking to people there, but it was fun, we brought the trailer that we built and the judges were really impressed with the CAD drawings and renders I had made of it. They were accurate down to the smallest detail as far as they were concerned. It was a fun little trip really.
During this time I was skipping a lot of class. Call it 60-100% of class days, I was out building something or not doing typical school. How I was doing that was through being in 3 periods of shop, and one period of Digital Electronics, where I had a really good relationship with my teacher and he would, generally after some bickering, let me go work on my projects and then a couple hours after school every day of the week and sometimes on the weekend.
Ya see, I tell you, I can’t not build things. It’s just how I’m wired. I’m always working on something.
At this time I had learned how to program the big plasma CNC cutter and became it’s main steward in the absence of my shop teacher.
Gentle hands.
A note on my teachers. Only positive things I promise.
There were two of them that stood out to me as just being really special.
My engineering teacher. This guy shaped me and helped me get to where I am today. Everything good about my engineering skills, and various other things about life I’ve learned along the way I owe to him. He’s an incredible character and one whose relationship I will always cherish. He was so supportive, he gave the initial seed money for the rocket, let me help him run the lab and gave me many chances to fix my (many) mistakes and own up to them.
He always had a smile on his face and worked harder than anyone in that building, carrying all the engineering classes and the engineering club on his shoulders. An incredible character from A to Z. He’s one of the few things I miss about high school. All these things that I’ve built, they are not just about me. They are about me being the product of the environment and the people around me.
I once read a quote, not sure who to attribute it to, but it said for every star, there are a thousand gentle hands guiding it.
I am not a star, but I did have a thousand gentle hands guiding me.
And he really was one of those gentle hands who helped me out at various times in my high school. He took me to nationals multiple times, where I did not disappoint him. He’s someone who I really look up to and enjoy spending time with and he’s taken me on a lot of the journeys and adventures who’ve shaped who I am. After my parents, he tops the list of living people I’d most credit with where I am today.
He used to be an engineer for 18 years, then he taught for 18 more, and now he’s become a counselor. It’s something he’s wanted for quite a few years now, and finally got it. I’m happy for him, despite wishing he was still there for the underclassmen. He was truly one of a kind, and many many thousands of students’ lives were impacted positively because of him. I’m happy for him in his new counseling job at MISD, it’s definitely a change of pace for him as he doesn’t have to work anywhere near as much now that he’s a bit older.
Only downside was MISD still hasn’t found someone to replace him, despite spending a semester searching, so the golden days are likely over unfortunately. They are really stupid about it. You expect someone with an engineering degree to take a huge pay cut to come and teach snobby high school kids? Starting salaries for most engineering positions is $80k on the low end and this teaching position only paid $50k. So yeah, if someone could just tell them to double that number, it would solve their problem pretty freaking quick.
But MISD never actually cared about engineering. The fact that we had one of the best engineering departments in the nation was one of the school’s best kept secrets. We were consistently one of the top teams in the nation in various TSA competitions and disciplines. A shame to see that this program has unfortunately peaked. A golden age has come to an close.
Another person who was really special to me was my metal shop teacher. This man was a real character, man had zero tolerance for bullshit and was one of the most secure and confident people I’ve ever met. He just had a quiet cool about him and he wasn’t afraid of anything. The best part about him was just how honest and critical he was.
Nobody called me out on my bullshit as much as he did, but most of the time he was right and had excellent points. He really disliked the way school treated kids and objected to many of the time wasting tactics used in school. He had a background in ranching and animal care, was an all around great guy who let me work on projects, while also being someone who’s opinion and advice I could always count on to be truthful and point out my flaws to me explicitly.
Honorable mentions were my woodshop teacher, computer science and ISM teachers. All of whom were very supportive of all my endeavors, but I never felt like I had a really personal connection to any of them. With the two other guys, it was obvious and we all got along really well.
Generally, in school, teachers either really hated me, or really liked me. There almost was no in between. In hindsight, a lot of it was my fault, but it shows how different personalities react to my shenanigans in a way which I am much more familiar with now, and therefore I’m able to predict generally how people will react to my shenanigans much more accurately, avoiding bad situations a lot more than when I was younger.
I finished up welding my stand at this time, plasma cut the blast shield welded it, plumbed the engine incorrectly, posed the rocket for some yearbook photos. They did me dirty and totally messed up the story and stuck it in a little corner. Oh well. It’s fine really, I probably miscommunicated.
High School → College
Senior year was nearing an end and I never really felt it until the very last day when I realized. Oh wow. This is my last day here. I still remember that feeling, it was a strange mix of feeling really sad, really nostalgic and in a very small way proud of the community I built there and the things we worked on. Mixed with the classic dose of fear and excitement for college.
The summer was pretty bland. A lot of basic rocket plumbing and working at Taco Bell. Engineering Club went to nationals and had a lot of fun, but it was mostly for giggles, nothing really life changing happened there. I just got to spend time with people who I really liked. It was great!
Ok. Small tangent. I have wanted to go to college for YEARS. I tell you, it was a personal fantasy of mine, mostly because I wanted the independence, but being somewhere surrounded by smart kids who liked to build things. That was the real fantasy there, a place which creativity was rewarded and hacks and pranks were the cool thing to do. But when I got there, I was slowly and steadily let down. I always had this theory that there was, by sheer force of numbers, bound to be someone interesting among the 70,000 people on this campus. I just had to seek them out and I had to create those experiences for myself and those around me since the school inherently was not going to do it for me. It simply was interested in collecting my tuition fees and getting good USNews ratings. Any creativity is almost always squashed, but with enough determination you can spend all your time outside of school doing things that are more educational, fun and interesting than the things that you did in school. It’s just that you have to create those opportunities yourself. There are a lot of golden nuggets lurking in the dirt.
Fast forward to August. Hardest part for me about moving in was finding a place to live and someone to live with. It was a really stressful ordeal but it all worked out in the end. I chose to live off campus because living on campus is:
Expensive
Cramped
Subject to the University’s whims on when you can live there.
I live in a ground floor apartment of a fourplex in a roundabout just around a mile off campus on a bus route. Very nice location with very cheap rates. Me and my roommate combined pay $645 rent + $120 in utilities a month between the two of us.
Speaking of my roommate. His name is Ahmed and I met him through an online roommate database which was put together by the local mosque. He’s a great dude who really really really loves to talk to people, about religion, culture, pretty much anything. He lived in Pakistan for most of his life, but graduated from Beaumont, Tx and is here to study either pre-med or CS.
His talking does wear me down occasionally as I’m typically a fairly quiet person but other than that we get along very nicely.
Really great dude, couldn’t be happier with our situation. It took a while for me to get furniture as it just wasn’t a priority for the longest time, but with a bit of scrounging from Goodwill, Walmart, and the roadside, we put together a very nice place. It was the first time I had a place that really felt like mine and I really like it a lot more than all the houses I lived in as a kid. It’s just the way I’m wired, but I like to feel independent almost to a fault, so things like this matter quite a lot to me.
It took me about a week to really get settled in my skin. Hardest thing was figuring out food. I binged fast food for a while, but also ate some food my mom had made. I’d never spent any time in a kitchen so the learning curve was steeper than Everest. Suffice it to say, to give you an idea of my skill level, I managed to mess up Ramen. Twice. Once I cooked it for not enough time, and the other time I forgot to put the sauce packets. Truth be told I didn’t even notice until throwing the packet away when I saw all the flavor sauces. Tells you so much about my culinary IQ. It basically rounds down to 0. Taco Bell has only slightly improved it.
But hey, now I can put together some perfectly average ramen!
Aside from housing troubles, my dad and I drove down one time before move in, dropped the mattress, bed and rocket off. For the stand I had it stored at RELLIS in the back of one of the shops, thanks to Dylan Mahoney, the former SRT ( A&M Sounding Rocketry Team) president. Single coolest member on SRT, hands down. At this time, I was fairly convinced that me and SRT were going to do something together, but that clearly didn’t happen, and truth be told, it’s much better this way. Like I said, I like my independence, and much prefer a small team of a couple of people to a huge bureaucracy. I’m just not a fan of that way of operating except when I really have to.
It’s so funny, in the summer I came up with a new project which was basically a spaceshot liquid rocket. I presented it to them and they were like ehhh maybe, mmmm no. I had raised like $10k from Steven for it, which winded up just going to my other rocket. In the first couple weeks of school I applied to SRT, gave them an interview which I absolutely crushed, and after some time wasting they told me they wanted a grand total of nothing to do with me. Yes, that spaceshot was optimistic, but I knew that going in. I’m still going to do it one day in the near future, but it’s not useful as anything other than a growth statement and PR stunt, which not gonna lie, could be pretty useful and fun.
I got mad about the rejection for about 15 minutes, then just laughed it off, said it was their loss and proceeded to start my own rocket team, move into the storage unit, and the rest is history. I think it was a huge strategical error for them to reject me, but in some time, they’ll realize their mistake.
Anyways, aside from the daily challenges of feeding myself, my first order of business was to get involved with the FEDC somehow. Well. You all might have heard how that panned out, I got fired within a week and a half. Which kickstarted my next project.
More info ( both on rocket and on FEDC troubles):
Listen, I REALLY liked that job. Okay. I LOVE working with my hands. Building things for me is pretty much an existential need. If I get bored, I always want to be building something or repairing something. I liked this job because the learning opportunities were huge. I wanted to be able to learn how to machine things, get better at welding, learn to program 3-5 axis metal CNC machines. Learn the art of machining from the master machinists in the shop.
But no. That didn’t happen. I got as far as learning the lathe and a little bit of mill work and then got let go because of the longboard tail I built out of scrap wood.
That longboard tail was just a stroke of pure luck. I had forgot my charger somewhere on campus and I skated to go get it, found the building locked, got bored so I went to Zachry, decided I wanted to build a longboard tail, then checked into the design center so I could sit and design it in fusion, then I realized almost immediately that designing it would take more time than it took just to build it, so I just walked into the shop, built it and tested it outside. Next morning I get fired. I understand the pressures that were on the shop manager that forced his hand, but I still staunchly refuse this way of operation.
Sorry mate, but this whole situation of me not being able to build things when I want to just isn’t going to work for me. Neither in the short term, nor the long term.
After I got fired, I was pretty much a wreck for a whole week, walking past the shop made me so unbelievably sad. I called Steven (midwitSteven on twitter) and explained my situation. He explained to me that, the qualities of independence and agency that got me fired were some that people like him very much valued and that I shouldn’t be so hard on myself for having been exiled from a situation which punished those qualities. We then tossed around the idea of a makerspace as the answer to the question of what do I need short term to get going? So first we attempted to raise money and rent a house, even found a really pretty house on a bus route which we wanted, but the funder got cold feet and decided against it. Maybe for the better, oh well. Then after finishing the test stand, that blog post I linked totally skyrocketed, helped me raise roughly $45k, and got to work like an absolute dog on getting a makerspace opened.
Seriously, that Sunday was totally and completely insane. I initially got a twitter DM from someone 20 minutes after posting, another DM later that night about a a 35k donation, and later that week, two more donations of 5k each.
It was like being on LSD. ( not that I’d know lol) But I was so jittery, just totally overwhelmed, it was like holy crap, my dreams are coming true in the weirdest way possible, and wtf, ME? IS THIS REALLY HAPPENING?
After me and Mr. 35k ( I’ll do identity reveals later, I just haven’t asked permission yet) had a nice little chat, I was out at night, skating in circles on my longboard sipping hot chocolate in the middle of a parking lot while on the phone with Steven. It was insane. I was totally and absolutely wired.
It was just incredible. So I call up Michael Frost, rush over to his dorm, and I spill the beans, and we’re both just sitting there laughing like maniacs, half laughing, half crying, in complete shock and disbelief. I feel as though I wasn’t doing that day justice, but it was such an absolute joyride emotionally. The house of cards hasn’t yet come crashing down, so I proceed with cautious optimism and pure ruthlessness.
That was the week of November the 13th. Everything about makerspace shenanigans happened since then. We spent some time setting up the organization, had Thanksgiving break, and by early December we were like hey, what if we rented the biggest storage unit we could and turned it into an experimental makerspace to hedge our bets, see if this is going to work.
WE WENT OUT AND FREAKING DID IT.
( sorry for the caps, but the dopamine rush of saying you are going to do something insane and than actually freaking doing it is unbelievable.)
Most successful experiment I’ve ever run. People LOVE the space so much! One of my friends from middle school who goes to A&M was like, you know Ismail, your projects are normally batshit crazy ambitious, but this one, this one I like a lot. It’s so great and I love this place! Then he hooks me up with a massive student org that is wanting to use the space and so believe it or not, we’re already getting customers.
The reactions to the place were pretty much universally positive. Ranging from, ‘ok wow this is cool and very unique’ to ‘okay this is awesome how do I help’.
Lemme back up a bit.
The last week of October, first week of November roughly, Steven came and visited town and helped me kick off weekly social events for cool people who liked to build things. At first it was vague and kinda weird, and I had to keep changing the time and location and only send out the location the day of, it was just totally hectic, but in a weird sort of way it worked. It allowed me to build a small network of people who liked building things and their friends who also liked building things.
The point of these meetups is to a movement for New Young People Systems which don’t totally revolve around college and the stereotypical paths. While I’m limited in what I can say, I’ll say this vision involves helping young people figure out what they like to do and then help them do more of it. Whether that be with grants from Steven’s Chaos Funds or 1517, or space in my makerspace for them to build things, or knowhow, my job was to facilitate these things.
But something changed suddenly when we opened spaceZero ( storage unit makerspace), and that was that we suddenly had our own location, which we could use as a magnet for interesting people.
The pitch went from: “Hey want to come to a random social event where people who like to build things sit, talk and eat pizza?“
to: “Hey we built a makerspace, come check it and the people who use it out! Oh and pizza too.“
Suddenly it became a whole hell of a lot easier to get people in the door because now there was a much much much bigger carrot at the end of the stick.
Also, a lot of these relationships, were totally and completely serendipitous. Like one guy I knew was a friend of a friend. Michael was another friend of a friend, but I barged into his dorm and we chatted about rockets, then slowly became really good friends. Two guys I recruited from cold emailing one of them to let me sneak into their team meeting because I thought they didn’t know what they were doing. That encounter let me pick their best two team leads and recruit them.
The point I’m getting at here is that relationships are highly coincidental and serendipitous. Very very few people have a billboard on their head saying HI I’M AN INTERESTING PERSON, TALK TO ME!
But now we can just plug these weekly meetings to people that we see that we think are interesting, and then tell them to bring their friends. Slowly, you can make use of network affects, infiltrate organizations, and pretty soon everybody in the college of engineering will know about us. It’s only a matter of time.
Anyways, we really felt something really special at our 2nd to last meeting. Like everything clicked. We had cool people, a lot of cool things for them to talk about, a cool place to do it at and everyone seemed to have a really good time. Then on our last meeting, we all got together and built stools during finals week. Also a lot of fun. It shows just how absolutely massive of an effect your environment plays on you, the way you think and the way you interact with people around you.
For example, if you are sitting there in a bland office room, even with your best homies, with no stimulation, you simply aren’t going to have the best time, but if you go to say, a party, where all sorts of funny and goofy things are happening, you’ll wind up having a much better time.
Same analogy goes for these weekly socials. Now that they are in a makerspace, people will tend to talk about the projects that are being built, the people building them, and the things that they would want to build. It’s a sort of self filtering mechanism because somebody not interested in this kind of thing simply would not want to return again, but someone who is interested in this simply can. These socials have led to grants, and opportunities and projects and just all sorts of interesting things.
I like to say that new people are portals to new opportunities. A lot of my projects were started because I met someone, or got triggered by something that I saw or someone that I talked to, or got inspired by a person or a thing. And facilitating interactions in a cool environment between cool people is an absolutely solid launchpad for you to build lots and lots of projects.
A note about world changing projects. I was in the first draft of this, writing world changing projects in that last paragraph, but I realized a nuance about that idea that I would like to point out. The things that change the world tend to be unpredictable. History is chock full of things that were invented on accident, but happened to be really useful in a super bizarre way. Now, if things are unpredictable, then what is the most effective method to madness if changing the world is a long term goal?
Simply building more things. If you build a lot of projects, eventually something somewhere will net something positive. The key is to build a lot of things! So if you pack a bunch of young people in a makerspace, give them the tools to succeed, you could very easily be creating huge projects and world changing teams.
BESIDES. It’s not about the projects!!
It’s about the people who build them. I like to say, that the real success of the rocket was not the things we built, it was the things we learned and the people we became because of what we built and the people we met along the journey. It’s about the journey not the destination, it always has been.
If we can facilitate a network of educational journeys, you can create what the university aspires to be. A serendipitous interplay between highly interesting people will only yield more interesting results and proceed to make those people all the more interesting.
It’s why people went to cities. To meet new people and find new opportunities to grow and get jobs.
Feelings Upon Year End
Yes I know, I missed some things but I’m at the point of just #sendit. I probably messed this one up, but I’ve found my best writing is when I let go of formats and simply speak words through my fingers. It’s an odd sensation but one that allows me to more accurately formulate my thoughts, and after all that’s the point of this thing. If you want to know more about my 2022, there’s a sort of archive being built on this Substack and on my various other medias and if you have anything you are curious about, just ask.
I don’t bite….(unprovoked).
hah.
At this point, if I continued to write about every little thing I’d be here for even more days.
But I feel like a new person. I feel like I have grown very substantially, both in soft skills and technical skills. I have experienced a lot this year, and at an increasing frequency. Bizarre and unique experiences have happened to me a whole lot more in these last 4-5 months than in any time in my life before. It’s honestly what I had hoped out of college and it definitely exceeded my expectations in a weird way. Breaking and bending the rules to fit me has yielded a lot of unique results. It’s unpredictable and that’s what makes it fun. It’s risky in a way because well at any point I could fall flat on my face and lose everything, but I’m a stubborn man, I’ll be okay.
The Before/After Mentality.
I’d say the biggest thing that’s changed for me short of independence is the way I think. I’ve become much more aware of everything around me, much more willing to go out on a limb and go on adventures, much more willing to talk to people who I’d never met. Not only that but I’ve got all these ventures and projects, which definitely expanded the scope of my thinking significantly.
Before, my thinking was tied up in the micro details of the things I was building, but more recently it’s all about the macro. The big questions about the makerspace, the rocket, and sales for carpentry. Yeah I understand, maybe these things all don’t pan out, but I’d rather have tried, failed and learned rather than have never played the game.
It’s definitely a lot of fun to work and think like this.
ALSO. Hugely underrated, but finally finally my writing skills have come back to power. I always thought I was better at math then literature, but nope, writing is something I’m a just a hell of a lot better at. For a rocket engineer, I’m surprisingly bad at math. Anyways, I realized a couple of months ago just how powerful writing could be as a tool for thinking and processing memories and experiences. There’s so much about my life that I haven’t processed - and I suspect most people haven’t processed a lot of what they have done or what circumstances they’ve found themselves in and are missing out on a lot of what they’ve learned from those experiences.
In addition, people skills. Definitely a huge improvement. Not much to say here, except my instincts for humor and people’s emotions have been really sharpened, to the point where I can now joke around in Spanish. Most of joke delivery is about the nonverbals anyways. Delivery is EVERYTHING. I should write a post on humor. It’ll be so much fun.
It’s so funny, humor makes everything better. Having a bad day at work? Comment on something someone is wearing. Comment on their car, ask about something interesting, then flip it into a joke. Poke fun at your coworkers, it’s okay, it builds comradery. They’ll laugh too if you are doing it right.
I know it’s not as easy as it sounds, but I’ve been playing around with other peoples’ brains for years now. It takes a while to get to the point with each individual where I can reliably predict what makes them laugh and what doesn’t but it’s such a fun skill to develop it makes life interesting in every single discipline. Messing with people in a humorous manner started as a weird result of being curious and bored at the same time in class. It’s excellent entertainment for me under all circumstances, but when I’m good at it, it’s really fun for those around me as well.
Another thing I’ve gotten better at is taking care of myself and my appearance. I put zero effort or thought into how I looked in high school except on special occasions. Now I’m putting more effort into appearance, into caring for my hair ( curly and growing longer!!), my clothes, fitness, etc. All these little details make a difference when meeting people.
People notice these things, subconsciously most of the time, but it makes a huge difference on first impressions. If people first see me as a crazy rocket hoonigan with an untamed afro, they’ll probably think I have terrorist organization links. Which, while is something I’d joke about, it not the best first impression.
For 2023, I’d like to keep my goals pretty basic.
Continue boxing/going to the gym 5x a week. ( I really enjoy boxing and it’s a daily thing short of rest days and I’ve been doing it for a couple weeks now) I don’t necessarily care where it leads. I started this to lose weight because I woke up one day and hated being fat but at this point I’ve kind of forgot about the weight loss and was mostly just really enjoying boxing and lifting.
Meet new people every week. A lot of the coolest people I’ve met, I’ve met through the makerspace weekly events ( and the events that preceded them). I also plan on infiltrating a lot of the student orgs and campus events once we have spaceOne open.
Open spaceOne! This is going to be our first real makerspace. We’re focused on getting real estate this month. Right now we’re on the hunt for real estate, scouting out potential locations.
Get my grades up. I need a 4.0 this semester, so time management is really important. I failed my calculus class last semester unfortunately. Sure felt awful.
Fire Sparky.
Build and fire new TVC rocket engine, multiple iterations will be needed. Part of CPLC.
Sell carpentry in free time.
Grow out my hair.
Sleep less. Sleep research seems suspicious as heck. And I’ve been doing surprisingly well on less sleep ( literature says 4.5-5.5 is lowest I can go with no cognitive function impact) so I’m going to simply sleep less and see what happens. Also returning to my 6 am schedule. Probably going to stick to 5-6 hrs of sleep a night. It just tends to make it really obvious when I’m bored, because when I am bored, I’ll fall asleep. Which is no good for lectures, but lectures are a pretty horrible format anyways.
Been a pleasure 2022,
Ismail
LET'S GO; proud of what you and the bois have done so far.
Nice!