With the look of interest and wonder in his eyes, Eric Wang (12) ponders the complexities of common items such as door knobs and toilets to understand how they work and function as a quaint pastime. Reverse engineering, or understanding the process of creation of machines or utilities, is a hobby that Eric enjoys.

“I love reverse engineering things, and just figuring out how things work; how things, that people don’t really notice a lot, work,” said Eric.

The examination of common household objects and more complex instruments stemmed from his robotics program. He is involved in a private, outside of Harker, Robotics team called Paradigm Robotics. It is located at Kaushik Shivakumar (12) house, and he joined in ninth grade. Eric’s robotics partner, Rithvik Panchapakesan (12), comments on Eric’s hobby.

“It’s really important to understand how these other mechanisms work from different points of views, so I think he is really good at that. One of the big things of robotics is reverse engineering and I think we are all interested in that, but Eric has a really creative aspect to it.” Rithvik said. “Once he sees a mechanism he is able to know how it works and understand other concepts that other people have used. That’s helpful because when you understand a design, it helps us broaden our view and think of new designs.”

Kaushik points out Eric’s key attributes to their robotics program, which help the team succeed and come out polished and fine.

“Probably the most significant thing he has contributed to our club is his build quality. Everything is done with such care and attention to detail that, in its final form, the robot is very solid and very clean and it works as intended,” Kaushik said.

This fascination with breaking down objects to their core functions, along with his robotics interests, made him decide to take additional physics classes.

“After freshman physics, the next year I was like I want to take physics two because I thought maybe I could apply it in some way to robotics,” said Eric. “I’m going into mechanical engineering, so it will be lots of physics classes.”

Engineering, though intertwined with physics, helps with the overall understanding of robotics.

“Reverse engineering is a lot more intuitive, while physics is more theoretical; but in some ways it does help. But the class that I think really does help with it, and also vise versa, is engineering,” Eric said.

Eric’s Physics C teacher, Dr. Eric Nelson, describes Eric’s personality in class.

“He has an interesting collection of attributes. On one hand he aced the last lab report segment we did,” Dr. Nelson said. “He is stepping up to that writing style that I require which is postgraduate level. But on the other hand, I think his backpack has a portal to an alternate dimension because I’ve found that anything that goes in there will disappear for weeks at a time.”

Eric plans to take engineering classes in college and continue with the Paradigm robotics team, bringing his skills to aid next year’s team.