Announcing our 2024 PBKACA Scholarship Winner – Ezra Redeatu
This year’s winner is Ezra Redeatu, a senior at Lane Technical High School. He will be attending University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the fall to become an electrical engineer.
Ezra Redeatu, 2024 PBKACA scholarship winner
Here is the letter he sent to PBKACA:
I am so thankful to the Phi Beta Kappa Association of the Chicago Area for providing me with this scholarship. Not only is it helping me pay for college, but it has connected me with a wonderful community of academically driven minds. Being able to learn more about Phi Beta Kappa and its goals through the scholarship has been a blessing and I think it’s important that I share more about who I am and how I got where I am now.
The most important thing about me is my family, which has always supported my aspirations. My parents immigrated here together around twenty years ago, having had to leave everything they knew behind. Through the challenges they exemplified hard work. They both went back to school while raising three amazing children, while becoming a lawyer and an accountant. My sisters, while annoying as you might expect from younger siblings, are also extremely kind-hearted and supportive. It is thanks to my wonderful family that I had the freedom to pursue whatever fascinated me and become the person I am today.
Ever since I was young I have been enthralled with technology, always curious about how the mystical devices around me worked. This fascination led me to work with my church’s technology team. I helped set up and monitor the building’s audio-visual system and eventually was responsible for teaching others how to use everything from the recording cameras to the live streaming software. Through working with the team, I learned valuable lessons in collaboration and mentorship which have helped increase my passion for electrical engineering.
Working with the technology team, I realized what interested me most wasn’t the outside hardware where I traced wires and set up speakers. I was most interested in the software, the code that made things run and the logic behind it. To quench my curiosity, I went to Khan Academy, where I learned JavaScript and first explored programming on my own. Eventually this passion grew to my course schedule, leading me to take countless computer science electives and gain proficiency in languages such as Java, Python and C++and learn about app development, microcontrollers, AI and cybersecurity.
I finished many projects through these classes, including an android app to help tourists navigate Chicago, an automated drawer that opens at the push of a button on my phone, and an AI that uses naïve bayes algorithms to finish a sentence. The most memorable project was done with a Particle Argon where I received gas prices from the internet with the goal of finding the best price. I set the servo motor to point at the gas price on a dial and lip LRFs red or green relative to how good the gas price was. I used a webhook to collect the data every day at noon. While working on this project, I had to learn many new skills, which required many hours of effort put into debugging errors and gaining a greater grasp of methods in different libraries. These, many hours eventually led to greater programming literacy and more efficient solutions key skills I can use in any future project.
Through accomplishments like my Particle Argon project, I learned the greatest lessons and aspire even more to be an electrical engineer. While I attend the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I plan to continue to grow in my chosen field and make valuable contributions to my community with the many lessons I learned to get to this point.