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sophistication of the projects to the way the students presented their ideas.
    At the fair, I walked the convention hall to check out the other projects, when I saw that a small crowd had gathered around one of the displays. Once I began reading the scientist’s board, I was absolutely speechless: she had discovered a new way to detect land mines using sound waves.
    I stood there staring in disbelief.
    â€œHi, I’m Marian Bechtel,” the young girl said as she extended her hand to me.
    I wanted to know everything. My first question—how?
    Marian said she had met a group of international scientists working on a device that used holographic radar to detect buried land mines, and had become inspired by their work. She had been playing the piano when she noticed that the strings on a nearby banjo resonated when she played certain notes or chords. This gave her an idea—she realized that using acoustic or seismic waves to excite a buried land mine could allow for their detection.
    â€œI was able to combine my newfound passion for humanitarian de-mining with my love of music,” she said.
    Next to her display was a simple prototype of an acousticdetection device she had created out of the frame of a scrap-metal detector.
    Hearing her story made me feel inspired. When it came time to present my idea to the judges, I was on my game. I still had that index card with my brother’s tips. I didn’t try impressing the judges with big words. Instead, I kept my presentation understandable and interesting.
    Like at my local science fair, there were a bunch of different special categories along with an overall winner. I was just happy to be there. When the judges announced that I had finished first place in the nation for middle school, I screamed—not so much out of joy, but out of total shock. It was an unbelievable honor to have my project be recognized nationally in my age group.
    However, the biggest news of all was that Luke finished first overall, which meant that he had earned a spot to compete in the Holy Grail of science fairs—the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (or ISEF).

    Me and Luke with our I-SWEEEP awards
    When my parents told me I was going to accompany him to San Jose, California, where the event was being hosted, I ran around the kitchen island in frantic circles, making everyone, including myself, dizzy.
    I arrived at ISEF as his guest and was surprised to see it was nothing like my local science fair, with a mixed assortment of sort-of-good and sort-of-bad projects, or even like I-SWEEEP. ISEF was the best of the best. These kids all had superior projects, and they were passionate, articulate, and brilliant. In a word, they were all perfect.
    I got to spend almost a whole week hanging out with these older and wiser kids, and I was totally starstruck. I went up and down the aisles of the science fair like a little kid in a candy shop, asking everyone about their projects. ISEF made these cool cards for each scientist. Each had a picture on one side and a short bio on the back, and I collected the cards of all the finalists and studied them intensely.
    How did Luke do at ISEF? Let’s just say he won $96,000 in prizes. I’d never felt more in awe of my brother.
    The last day of the competition, I was sitting in the audience as Amy Chyao, who was only sixteen years old, walked up to the stage to accept the competition’s top prize, the Gordon E. Moore Award, for her amazing experiment that used light energy to activate a drug that kills cancer.
    As soon as I returned home to Crownsville, I went online to learnmore about Amy Chyao and all the wonderful things she was doing. Her story was even more inspiring than I could have ever imagined.
    During her freshman and sophomore years in high school, Amy taught herself chemistry. Then she applied what she had learned to improve photodynamic therapy, the process of treating superficial skin cancers with light.