By Jacob Kronenberg

When I was little, I wanted to be an inventor. At the age of five, my grandmother told me that I descended from Thomas Edison. I did some investigating and it turns out that my grandmother’s grandfather was friends with Thomas Edison’s father, Samuel Edison. It’s a tenuous connection, but when you’re five, that’s more than enough. When I wasn’t building structures from Tinkertoys, Lincoln Logs, or Legos, I was sprawled out on my floor drawing solutions to the problems in my life with crayons. I remember dreaming up an automatic sorter to organize my messy room and a device to let me insert straws into Capri-Sun juice pouches without poking through the back side. You see, childhood’s most pressing problems. I was drawn to stories where the brilliant and solitary engineer devises thousand patents. If anyone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I knew what to tell them.

In school, I focused on science extracurriculars. I joined the Science Olympiad team in middle school because I loved the competition and the excitement of a new problem. Plus, it was the hot thing to do in middle school. Believe me. Science is cool. All of those competitions prepared me for the height of my middle school science career, the epic eighth grade sludge test. Our science teacher mixed up a sludge and we had to use our knowledge of chemistry to separate and identify components from the glumpy sludge. While many other kids were frustrated by this impossible task, I reveled in the scientific problem solving challenge.

Outside of school, I was trying to invent too. I’d go over to my best friend’s house and build [...]