Ty Delargy — Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Ty Largey. I’m a former JSHS regional winner and national runner up from Bangor, Maine. And I look back on my time at JSHS. It’s one of the most formative and exciting experiences for me. It’s where I developed the skills that turned into a career. It’s where I cultivated the interests that caused me to dedicate my life towards solving particular kinds of problems. And it’s also where I met the highest concentration of problem solvers and world changers that I’ve ever met in my life. I mean, at the national level and regional level, the people in that room are all high schoolers that are brave and audacious enough to say, Hey, here’s a problem in the world I think I can solve with some engineering solution, or, you know, here’s something that is understudied and we don’t fully understand about the world. And I think with a little bit of hard work, we can understand that a little bit better. Um, that audacity to take a big problem, break that down into smaller subcomponents, and something that you can actually achieve and solve is an incredible skill and requires an abundance of creativity. Being around people that are all doing that really sparks ideas and gets that inspiration going to then realize that it’s not impossible and that, you know, we can all do that if we cultivate those skills and cultivate that creativity. Um, but in addition to that, once you do have a problem to solve, right, you’re developing all these other skills to actually put together a plan and go research that thing or build that solution. You’ll face countless setbacks in that process that build determination and character that will carry you through the rest of your life. And then you’ll put together a research paper which, you know, most people don’t get to do until they’re maybe you know, working on a PhD, and you might have done that now a couple of times by competing through JSHS and going through that process of putting together a quality research paper. And then coming out of the other side of that, you still have competition, which is largely about some of the soft skills of that of how do you present that research, get people bought into the problem and the seriousness of a problem, as well as the solution. You now get to interpersonally, you know, communicate with people, get feedback, solicit help, and you know, carry that forward into maybe the next iteration of that project. It’s the best start at boot camp in the world, and having founded a couple of companies, not all of which were successful, but those various skills and the fact that I got to start developing those skills at such a young age is a huge differentiator and a huge you know, thing that’ll give you such a leg up in the professional world, wherever you go, whatever you do, all of these experiences carry through to other things, whether that’s being a researcher, being a good employee, being a founder, leading teams, trying to come up with creative solutions to problems. These are all skills that you will develop in the process, and in no other place will you have an opportunity to do that in such a self directed way and such an organic way that responds to, you know, Hey, I’m not interested in that thing anymore. I don’t want to research that or build engineering solutions that, you know, require knowledge of chemistry. I don’t like chemistry anymore. I’m going to go over here and learn how to code. That’s what I did. Verbatim is go from, you know, a chemistry solution for an environmental problem to building a device for the blind using software and cameras and all that kind of stuff. Um, and in that process, you will undoubtedly find out a little bit more about yourself, what you’re interested in, what you’re capable of. And I guarantee you finding out what you’re capable of your expectations for yourself will increase and not decrease over that time. So it’s completely worth doing. I don’t know anybody that did it that was in my school or other schools that had anything bad to say about the process. I think they’re all very glad of having gone through it. Even ones that went on to have nothing to do with STEM fields and become lawyers, they all learned something incredibly valuable in the process. So I’m sure you will, too.