{"id":344337,"date":"2021-05-17T06:05:23","date_gmt":"2021-05-16T20:05:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/?p=344337"},"modified":"2021-05-17T06:05:23","modified_gmt":"2021-05-16T20:05:23","slug":"watching-passion-and-perseverance-pay-off","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/watching-passion-and-perseverance-pay-off\/","title":{"rendered":"Watching passion and perseverance pay off"},"content":{"rendered":"

Editor\u2019s Note: This article was originally published in The Harvard Gazette (https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2021\/05\/robert-malate-21-puts-passion-and-perseverance-into-play\/). Reprinted with permission.<\/em><\/p>\n

When Harvard University \u201cde-densified\u201d the campus to prevent the spread of COVID-19 last March, Robert Malate (Class of 2021) left Cambridge and traveled nearly 8,000 miles to his home on Saipan in the Northern Marina Islands.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was one of the toughest things I had to do. The time zone difference was 14 hours, and all of my classes were still ongoing,\u201d he said. \u201cI remember waking up at 3 o\u2019clock in the morning to go to class. Having the discipline to push through and finish that semester was a huge adjustment for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was also a huge accomplishment that reinforced a lesson he learned time and again over the course of his four years at Harvard: passion and perseverance really do pay off.<\/p>\n

Valedictorian of his high school class, Malate knew he wanted to pursue engineering and that he\u2019d have to leave the island to do it. He figured if he had to go abroad for college, why not apply to the top Ivy League school?<\/p>\n

It was a thrill to be admitted, but also a challenge to adjust to life so far from home. The population of the entire tropical island of Saipan (only 12 miles long and 5 miles wide) is about 55,000, while metro Boston, with its cold and snowy winters, is home to nearly 5 million people.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Robert Malate<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Malate, who chose to concentrate in mechanical engineering at the\u00a0John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, found that building a tight-knit network of friends was a cure for homesickness. He developed strong relationships with peers in the\u00a0Harvard Undergraduate Robotics Club\u00a0and\u00a0Harvard Undergraduate Aeronautics, where the aerospace-minded Malate had the opportunity to build an aircraft for the first time.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is cool to do all these equations and get a final derivation, but honestly it is kind of meaningless if it doesn\u2019t translate to something,\u201d he said. \u201cSo once I saw the aircraft actually working, I was amazed. I really enjoyed seeing how all the theoretical work translates into the real world. That taught me a whole new set of skills.\u201d<\/p>\n

Looking for an enriching experience outside of engineering, Malate decided to join the Harvard Breakers, the University\u2019s break dancing club. He\u2019d never danced before, but had seen peers break dancing and was curious about what was involved.<\/p>\n

A lot of practice, it turns out.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt took me a year just to learn one move, but it was worth the effort,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was very different for me. In engineering, if you have a problem, you could just work on it the night before. But when you are trying to learn something like break dancing, you have to work on it every day. Learning what it takes to master a certain move has been really rewarding for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

The perseverance he developed as a break dancer has come in handy throughout his academic career, especially when he decided to dive into a brand new challenge\u2014learning Mandarin Chinese.<\/p>\n

To Malate, studying Chinese was much harder than even the toughest engineering problem.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is a really slow process for the benefits of all those language lessons to take effect,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I really got to learn how to think a different way and communicate with people more clearly.\u201d<\/p>\n

He had a chance to put those language skills to good use during a summer spent teaching at a STEM camp in Suzhou, China. During the program, Malate taught 3D printing and computer programming to middle schoolers, and though the program was taught in English, there were many times when he had to dip into his linguistic knowledge to get a point across.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt forced me to learn the material much better. Figuring out how to explain the material to students who were 11 years old was a new challenge. I couldn\u2019t just throw in random jargon, since English wasn\u2019t their main language,\u201d he said. \u201cSo I had to figure out how I could explain these concepts in ways they could understand.\u201d<\/p>\n

He surprised himself by how much he enjoyed teaching. It was rewarding to see others light up when they grasped concepts or shared his excitement about topics, he said. So he began serving as a teaching fellow for \u201cMechanical Systems\u201d (ES 125) and \u201cComputational Solid and Structural Mechanics\u201d (ES 128).<\/p>\n

The patience he honed as a teacher has been especially useful in a research environment.<\/p>\n

Fascinated by the\u00a0Robobee project, Malate joined the\u00a0Harvard Microrobotics Lab\u00a0of\u00a0Rob Wood, Charles River Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences, during his junior year. Though he was working remotely due to the pandemic, he helped design a computer model to simulate the bending of the diminutive robot\u2019s wings during flight.<\/p>\n

It was a unique application of his interest in aeronautics, and helped inspire his senior thesis project. Malate is adding a buoyancy control unit to a robotic mermaid so it can dive deeper and better perform underwater tasks, like deep sea exploration.<\/p>\n

After graduation, he plans to work internationally and focus on robotics companies that are developing tools that can improve people\u2019s lives.<\/p>\n

Looking back, despite the culture shock he felt at the outset of his college career, and the disruption of having to return to Saipan midway through his studies, Malate found a perfect fit at SEAS.<\/p>\n

\u201cHarvard engineering really is unique. Having the liberal arts environment enabled me to learn about so many other fields, and interact with people who are experts in those fields,\u201d he said. \u201cHarvard has so many people from vastly different backgrounds who can tell you many different stories.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Editor\u2019s Note: This article was originally published in The Harvard Gazette (https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2021\/05\/robert-malate-21-puts-passion-and-perseverance-into-play\/). Reprinted with permission….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":344339,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[900],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-344337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=344337"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344337\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/344339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=344337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=344337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=344337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}