I love making things with my hands, from a cardboard house in 2020 to power-tool projects today. The kitchen is another place where I love to make things. Because I am allergic to nuts and eggs, I enjoy creating my own nut-free and egg-free recipes. Someday, I want to share them with friends who have allergies like me, so they can enjoy tasty food too.
Every time I visited our home in the U.S., my friend and I worked on building our own chairs. Wearing ear protection and safety glasses, I learned to cut boards on a miter saw with an adult guiding me.
After taking apart a handheld fan to see how its motor works, I used what I learned to design my own generator.
Next step: pour water in at the top so the flow can spin the generator on its own.
Each year I sketched, cut, sanded, and painted my own Pinewood Derby car. My car Greenfire took first place in the early rounds and finished second in the final race.
With a friend, I took apart old lumber and rebuilt it into an A-frame, using a drill and a jigsaw.
I love turning everyday materials into new creations: a cardboard robot built from boxes and bottle caps (2022), a 3D Harry Potter papercraft board (2024), a water bottle rocket with fins and a nose cone (2025), and a small wooden car that I built and test-drove across the floor (2025).
I drew a plan first, then built a cardboard house with a glue gun. This is where my love of making things started.
I chopped the vegetables, sliced the bread, and baked the dishes myself.
Tonkatsu is a crispy breaded pork cutlet, and the breading usually needs eggs to stick. Instead of eggs, I used milk and potato starch to help the breadcrumbs stick. Then I fried the cutlets until golden and served them with rice and sautéed vegetables.
Baking cakes I can safely eat started with a chocolate cake in 2023. I cut it into squares and decorated each piece with powdered sugar and sprinkles. A year later, I wrote my own cake recipe step by step on sticky notes, baked it, and topped it with whipped cream and candy. Each time, I learned a little more about how to make a cake soft and tasty without the ingredients I am allergic to.
I made a lasagna from scratch with a friend and shaped chocolate chip cookies.
One of my first times baking, using a hand mixer on my own.
My hobby is visiting old record shops in Seoul and the U.S. to hunt for classical LPs. Some of my favorite finds are Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, Liszt’s études, and Rachmaninoff’s piano concertos.
I didn’t want to just memorize that ab/c = (c√a)b, so I proved it myself. Starting from two exponent rules, I split b/c into its whole-number part and the leftover fraction and worked through it step by step.
While graphing quadratics, I noticed a pattern in the line from a parabola’s vertex to the y-intercept. I wrote down two rules, one for the line to the y-intercept and one for the line to the origin, and proved them myself.
For my school talent show, I put on a lab coat and performed a science experiment live on stage.
I found my own shortcut for finding a missing number in a set when the average is known: x = a₁ + (a₂ − a₁) × N. Then I worked out why it always works.
