Honestly, if that video, et. al. is 11 years old, then Eliot is old enough to participate here -- I'd love to hear HIS side of the story and I bet the HN crew could find him an engineering internship in like 30 seconds!
Eliot Here, I'd be happy to talk about the rocket and man I really could use one of those engineering internships it's been surprisingly hard to find things to apply to.
Were you the envy of all your friends at the time?
Do you remember the original trip to scout for parts? How did the plan and execution take part from your point of view & recollection?
Was the rocket always a rocket in your imagination? What else was it if not?
How about for your siblings and friends?
Any other rocket-related anecdotes?
Do you think it influenced your choice of career? Or was that just destiny?
Where, ultimately, do you want to go with your career? Genuine rocket scientist?
I'm agog. Also more than a little envious; my own father's home-built treehouse for me and my brother was little more than a plank in a tree with a rope ladder to get up to it. But that was plenty and, in my imagination, so many other things...
Growing up the rocket basically meant I had a place to chill out and definitely would hang out with my friends in it at one point my friends and I made a movie about going to an alien world with it as a central plot.
I don't know that envy was the right word but everyone thought it was pretty cool.
I do but only that I was really interested in the rivet guns as it was a tool I'd never seen before haha.
I'm kinda weird in that I don't have a mental eye so it wasn't like in my imagination like most people would think of it but it was definitely something that I spend a lot of time thinking about as a child.
My siblings are a lot younger than me so I don't know exactly but they definitely seem to think it's cool especially my younger brother.
I remember that when we went to maker fair with the rocket I could not be less interested in it and spend as much time as I could looking at the other displays because well I had the rocket at home.
I don't think the rocket specifically influenced my carrier choice but I got to participate in lot of projects like this with my dad for all of my childhood and so that definitely is a big reason I'm in college for mechanical engineering right now.
As a mechanical engineering major I really would love to go into robotics especially like conveniency things like home automation systems.
It definitely was one of those things that was just around when I was a kid and as I started on my own projects I look back at that project as my first.
Hey George! We should catch up! (to readers: I was the guy who hired George as an intern and he was awesome. so AMA too!)
AOLServer was so, so, so far ahead of it's time. It had a WYSIWYG HTML editor years before Dreamweaver that could post content to the server. The integrated (Illustra!) Database and TCL interpreter meant you could build basically anything with it. Props to Jimbo and Doug...
We built what I think might have been the worlds first massively multi-homed, self-provisioning hosting service (called, creatively, "Navi-Service") with it. Think Linode but in 1997.
Two things that still really matter in the (dire sounding) scenario you are painting: PEOPLE and RISK. SO here are my two recommendations -- they somewhat conflict, but depending on what kind of person you are (and are becoming!) one will resonate so just follow it:
1) PEOPLE: The relationships you make early in your career can end up being the most valuable thing you take away from your first couple of jobs. Go places where a) you like the people, b) they challenge you and you learn from them, and c) they share your values. People that were throwing up in the back of my car in college became lifelong friends -- now they are industry leaders, and we'll never lose that bond...
2) RISK: Take as much risk as you can stomach. You literally have nothing to lose right now, and you can try and fail at a bunch of things before other priorities (mortgage, wife, kids, whatever) make you risk averse. If you go to a startup right now, and it totally bombs, so what?! You just dust yourself off and do it again. It would be a shame to take a "safe" job early in your career, there will be lots of time for that.
Here's an example of how they conflict: if you go to a big company, there will be lots of opportunities to meet people, but no risk. If you go do a startup, there are only a few people, but lots of risk/opportunity.
For the next 10 years, expose yourself to as many experiences as you can, at some point something will click and you can run down that rabbit hole.
