Everyone’s freshman and sophomore year was filled with “get involved” this, “get involved” that. But is getting involved really that important to having a successful, and more importantly, fun high school career? Is taking that chance really worth it? To answer this question, I went to one of my good friends, Gavin Goldring, a senior at Huntingtown High School, and one of the most involved individuals I know.
Gavin partakes in a wide range of activities. He’s the secretary of the Class of 2024, NHS President, and he even attended flight school.
But above all of these, he invests most of his time into the STEM/Engineering pathway as NSBE’s (National Society of Black Engineers) current senator and previous two terms as president in 2019 and 2021. But what these activities have in common for Gavin is that he didn’t know he was truly interested in them until he gave them a proper shot.
Gavin was exposed to engineering at a very young age. At three years old his dad took him to AutoZone and bought him a “My First Toolkit.” Gavin’s father told him one thing: “Righty tighty, lefty loosey”, and the rest is history. Gavin spent a lot of his time as a kid taking apart toys with this toolkit, and his parents eventually stopped buying toys in fear that he’d immediately take them apart.
During Gavin’s freshman year back in 2021, he heard about the open applications for the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. “I didn’t know what that was, or what it contained, but as a freshman I was intrigued.” Said Gavin. “However, the age limit was 16, so I had to wait for next year to apply.” So, Gavin set a reminder in his calendar for next year around the same time the applications opened and waited. That next year came, and Gavin had completely forgotten about the internship application, but he received the reminder on his phone from last year. “Why not?” Gavin said, and he applied for the internship not expecting anything out of it, and to his surprise, he got in. “It’s something you shoot in the dark, you never know if you’re going to get it or not”. Once Gavin got into the program, one of the first things he heard from one of his college mentor students was “drop your ego or you won’t understand what you’re doing; this isn’t high school.”
With this newfound knowledge, Gavin continued the internship and has gained invaluable experiences from it. One project he worked on consisted of designing and creating testha equipment for the NASA mission: Dragonfly, where NASA will send an octocopter to Saturn’s largest moon, Titian, in 2027. During this project, Gavin designed a piece of the circuit board for the octocopter, forever solidifying him as a valuable asset to that mission. If Gavin had never applied, or even gotten interested in the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory internships, he would have never gotten this insane opportunity.
During the 2023-2024 school year, the lab took part in NASA’s DART (Double Asteroid Realignment Test mission, where they would design technology to intercept asteroids that might hit earth. This was during the end of the school year, and Gavin was already involved in other programs, and wasn’t sure he wanted to take part in this project, so he declined the offer. A few months later on September 23rd, the mission was a success and the world’s first planetary defense demonstration prevailed. Gavin not taking that chance not only stripped his involvement in the project, but he missed an opportunity to meet Bill Nye the Science Guy. “Bill Nye was in the room I could have been in.” Says Gavin” “I had a badge and everything, I could have gone, I really could have, but I didn’t take that chance.
”These experiences all lead up to the Golden Torch Award Gavin will receive in March of 2024 during the NSBE Annual Convention in Atlanta, Georgia. Gavin was recognized for this award for his academics, engineering experience, and most importantly, his involvement in a multitude of extracurricular activities that made his resume stand out from the rest.
So, to answer the big question: “Is getting involved worth it?”. Yes. It most certainly is. It isn’t required to graduate or get into college, but if you want to help yourself stand out when applying to a higher education college or scholarship, having at least one or two strong extracurricular activities will help that process. And even if you aren’t going to college, the experiences you’ll have are something you will never forget.
