Carter Haber is breaking the mold. Catching the eye of the Mauler Institute after single-handedly raising $10,000 for Fort Worth's Samaritan House at age 12, he was chosen as one of 10 students they privately advise. There, he took their specialized placement test, solidifying engineering as his perfect match. "This made me really happy, considering the placement test I took in high school said I should be an elevator repair man," he said. Encouraged to attend the prestigious ID Tech Camps at SMU and St. Edwards, Carter spent the next two summers winning robot wars, mastering multiple programming systems and became C++ certified, all before he even had a learner's permit.
Determined to attend the ID Robotics Engineering Camp at MIT, Carter worked hard to stay competitive with the other campers. "At my school, we only have basic computer science. These kids have robotics and advanced computer science classes. If my school had these classes, it would open a lot of different doors for people." Left to his own innovations, Carter spent three months saving up money to buy the materials he needed to build a robot in his spare time.
Carter's determination and hard work paid off, as he went off to MIT's campus this summer. During camp, Carter was paired with another camper and given the challenge to build and program a robot. Instead of downloading the schematics and blueprints from the Internet as other campers did, Carter and his partner wrote their own. Carter wrote more than 1,000 lines of code and an additional 50 lines for his final robotic challenge. Their robot could adapt to work with other team's robots, detect walls, directions and could recognize the specific objects it encountered.
Carter aspires to attend Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where the first Engineering major was founded in 2006. "Figure out what you want to do, so you can focus on your own passions and what you want to become in the future," he advised.
