Helen Hoang (‘25) balances Edison and Angelou as she creates robots and literary magazines. As the president of STEP UP, participant in Science Olympiad, president of Amador Writers Ensemble, and editor of Lighthouse Literary Magazine, Hoang demonstrates creativity in every sense.
“I think they overlap in the sense that it’s a way for me to explore more about myself,” said Hoang.
Engineering and Academics
Last year, as a member of STEP UP, Hoang won the NASA TechRise Challenge, which gave the club the opportunity to travel to the Mojave Desert. There, they created and tested a payload in a rocket-powered lander.
“We wanted to incorporate so many sensors, so many different components to collect many different types of data. That in itself was an ambitious idea that we just went forth with, and it worked,” said Hoang.
Her current achievements did not come without years of work. In fact, Hoang has been interested in STEM since elementary school.
“It began in a fourth-grade science fair where I built a traffic light simulator out of an Arduino microcontroller… I just carried on to now where I still explore different fields but kind of have a greater sense of where I want to go… which is specifically engineering,” said Hoang.
Writing and Creativity
Alongside her prior interest, Hoang‘s desire to find community in her new high school setting fostered her involvement in creative writing.
“As a new freshman in high school, I… wanted to have something that I was already… familiar with, which is writing club because that was where I was in middle school,” said Hoang.
Now, Hoang’s passion and skill have led to her being president of the Amador Writers Ensemble and the editor of The Lighthouse Literary Magazine.
“Sometimes I like to take out my old notebooks and read my old poetry and cringe a bit,” said Hoang.
Where Left and Right Brain Meet
Despite their seeming differences, Hoang believes robotics and writing have more in common than what meets the eye.
“It’s a way for me to explore more about myself. For writing… it’s a form of expression in my thoughts and ideas. But with engineering, it’s also my ideas in more of a handcrafted, hands-on experience. So in a way, they’re both an important part of me,” said Hoang.
Hoang remains persistent in both STEM and the humanities and learns the importance of self-expression.
“There’s always many different ways to get to a solution, and it’s especially important to just get all your ideas out there… Get all your ideas out there, even if they’re bad, even if they’re half-developed, even if they’re abstract. But those ideas can eventually develop into something greater,” said Hoang.
