I felt beads of sweat rolling down my neck as the bridge creaked, its wooden beams flexing at strange angles. With a pounding heart and shaky hands, I gingerly added more weight to the bridge. SNAP! I flinched as the 19-gram bridge that I had built for the State Science Olympiad came crashing down along with the 11 kilograms of sand it had held. The judge gave me a look that confirmed my unfortunate sentence and took my dignity with one cliché scribble on a clipboard. My pathetic bridge’s efficiency (grams of sand the bridge held divided by the number of grams the bridge weighed) turned out to be 580, half of what was necessary to earn a medal. In that moment, I realized that all my efforts had failed. As heartbroken as I was then, when I look back, I am actually thankful for this experience because the failure changed my definition of self-confidence.
I had first heard about Bridge Building from my Chemistry teacher in 10th grade. The challenge was to build a bridge that spanned 45 cm, and the bridge with the highest efficiency would win. When this challenge was initially presented, nobody from my…show more content… I did research on the best bridge styles, and decided to build a truss bridge. I did calculations and found out that the truss bridge style would hold a significant amount of weight, and I created a blueprint. I thought my first design idea would create the winning bridge. Then, I ran into my first dilemma: I did not know how to actually build the bridge. I searched hours on the internet for hints on how to build, but nowhere did I find any tips, and I felt the first seeds of doubt being planted in my mind. I tried shunning these doubts and putting on a false bravado, trying to instill a false confidence in the minds of my friends, family, and teachers. But as the competition grew nearer, I found myself with glue spread out all over my working space, pieces of wood not sticking together, and my fingers glued
