Academic Achiever of the Week: Sarah Michael

PARKERSBURG, W.Va. (WTAP) - Our Academic Achiever of the Week plays tennis and basketball, volunteers, and has a 4.0. Did we mention she makes robots?

Sarah Michael has been a tinkerer her whole life. It’s what led her to robotics.

She remembered, “When I was young, I liked to work with legos so, when I got older, my mom and my dad got into - they heard something about First Lego League, which is a middle school program…,”

It was her first taste of building robots. Since then, she’s graduated from building with legos to building with metal.

This however wasn’t her first brush with tinkering.

Back in elementary and middle school, Sarah was running Ethernet cables up and down the halls with her dad. She not only helped him update the high school’s phone set-up, they created a security system together.

She said, “They wanted security cameras at the school because - just for safety reasons so we started that whole system and we spent like the entire summer here putting that stuff in.”

Sarah and her dad seem to be wired the same.

She said, “So anytime he was here working on stuff or at our church working on stuff, I would try to go with him because i really like doing that,”

Her parents’ introduction to technology was a big reason she chose the path that she did.

Sarah will be attending Ohio Northern University, pursuing a degree in mechanical engineering.

She knows she has big shoes to fill.

“He knows like a lot about technology and I would just like to know a minuscule amount of what he knows.”

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