How crazy does one need to be to spend 35+ hours learning hardware in the middle of finals week, then fly across the world alone for a week-long hackathon?
This was me. Running on late-night impulse, hopes and dreams, while balancing finals in junior year. On July 1–7, I attended Hack Club's Fallout in Shenzhen, China, where 180+ teens were flown out from all over the world to the global capital of hardware engineering.
Before Fallout, I didn't know anything about CAD, schematics, or PCB routing. It'd seem like the last place I'd go. But hardware always fascinated me, so I overcame a limiting mindset by building my first guided project to qualify: bear-magotchi. Repo: bear-magotchi
Flying international solo for the first time posed new challenges: it meant chasing connection flights, navigating foreign airports, crossing customs, and long layovers.
When the world is ending, what's the last project you'd build?
With teammates Erin Nguyen and Shelley Ma (Team Koiterers), I built Shoot That Soup — a stress-relief arcade-like game using an IR transmitter/receiver to light up an LED when Soup gets shot, with a servo-driven rod controlled by a Seeed Studio XIAO-ESP32-C3. Our project won the Prettiest Award.
Repo: Shoot That Soup GitHub Repo Demo: Shoot That Soup Demo Vid
I visited Huaqiangbei (华强北), the world's largest electronics market, and Seeed Studio's office, where we replicated the manufacturing process with paper hats. Meeting Eric Pan and hearing how the XIAO was born inspired me to keep exploring hardware.
Amidst heavy rainstorms, I built bonds beyond borders, meeting teens from across the U.S., Canada, India, and beyond. I'll never forget the late-night karaoke, a sidequest to MixC mall, 3AM crashouts at the Maker Studio watching a team build a taser with rubber bought from Meituan (China's Uber Eats/Yelp).
Thank you to the organizers of Fallout — RenRan Sun, Sam Liu, and so many more. Thank you to Zach Latta and Hack Club for opening my eyes to a wholesome, driven community that shapes teens with real confidence and independence, not just the ability to build. Lastly, thank you to my parents for putting huge amounts of trust in me and freedom to have these kinds of adventures.
I didn't get into any prestigious summer programs, but I'm glad I chose to side quest. I created memories more precious than any prestigious summer program could ever recreate. I'm making my summer my own.
Hack Club taught me that if you truly put your heart into something, you can make it — and that stems from you alone. Only YOU can control the course of what you do and where you go. That's my drive going into senior year.
What if we met in Shenzhen?.. this was the question that carried me to the other side of the world.
