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KATASHA KALONJI
Oakland Technical High School,
Oakland, Alameda County
12th grade

UC San Diego COSMOS 2005
Kinetic Sculpture & Clocks: The Art of Mechanical Engineering and Design cluster

COSMOS was a very great experience; I heard about it through Techbridge at the Chabot Space and Science Center, Oakland. I applied first of all, because I liked the idea of going away during the summer. I also applied because I wanted to do something science-related for the summer as well. I guess you could say that I'm really involved in the Engineering Academy at my school, so I was really interested in picking that up in the summer also. I applied especially to San Diego because I thought it would be great for me to go to San Diego; I usually don't get the chance to travel anywhere so it was cool for my mom and me to drive all the way down there.

At COSMOS, the projects we worked on were cool as well. I was really glad that I was able to take something back home and say to everyone, hey! I made this from SCRATCH. The cluster that I was in used AutoCAD and Lasercam to make pendulum clocks and we went into the machine shop to put them together, which was really fun.

We also made a kinetic sculpture. We were split up into different teams and my team made a structure that played the song, "Take Me Out To The Ball Game." It was really fun to show everyone at the closing program "expo" what we had done during the month.

Also, COSMOS is really fun. The first thing that jumps out in my memories are the RA's (resident assistants). They were really funny and exciting and they really tried to make our time at COSMOS very comfortable. There were always games and events that they were setting up for us; there was a lot of time for having fun.

I really recommend COSMOS for people because it gives you so much hands-on experience that you would never have in your school classroom; especially for the oceanography students- since we were at UC San Diego, they had a lot of opportunities to study at the beach. Plus, meeting a whole bunch of new friends was really cool... I got really close to a lot of people, that even now, I still talk to.