It’s just funny to me how I’ve always been a builder. As long as I could remember, taking things apart and putting them back together. Tinkering with things. I suppose I got it from my dad, he was a mechanic, a tinkerer, an architect. He spent his whole life building, building, building. From car factories to building our house, he was good at it. And so I grew up building. Cars, science projects, catapults and slingshots, virtual building with programming. But what I think I was actually building up was a determination. A determination that anything can be done if you just put the pieces together right. If you just take a step back and look it over, you can find a way to make it work. It was a determination that got me to where I am now. It was a determination that when you met a wall, you built a ladder. It gave me this sense of not only was anything possible, bu I could make it possible. And that’s exactly what I’m doing. And so now my dad helps me build furniture for my new house, while I build particle accelerators and neutrino detectors.

It really says something about the US gun policy that students are largely unfazed in the midst of a school shooting. As someone who’s been through 3 “gunman in the building” incidents throughout my school career, I can tell you that students aren’t scared. These kids, they think like soldiers. Getting news of a threat in the building is met more with annoyance than fear