From Toy Repairs to Aerospace Engineering at TU Delft

A generational love of solving problems

Some of Hayato’s fondest memories are fixing toys and other objects with his grandfather, an electrical engineer who volunteered at a local toy repair shop. People brought in what was broken and he would do his best to fix it. Some evenings, he'd carry the toys home and Hayato would sit with him and help him take things apart and put them back together.

We did that since I was in elementary school - for example, we'd take a projector apart just to see how it worked, then try to put it back together; usually after covering the dining table with parts and getting scolded by my grandma because it was lunchtime. I was always interested in how the machinery worked. — Hayato

Flying to Japan every winter and summer, he'd watch the wing flaps extend outside the plane's window and want to know how it worked. "That's when I knew I wanted to do aerospace engineering." What started as one engineer taking toys apart with his grandson has become, one generation later, a plan to build the aircraft themselves.

A global citizen, twelve years in the making

Hayato's IB journey began at a school in China. There was time spent living in Hong Kong for third grade, then returning to mainland China for fourth and fifth, before beginning the MYP in Singapore and completing the DP at Stonehill International School in India. Twelve years immersed in an international curriculum amidst shifting cultural backgrounds lent him a truly global outlook.

"Through the years, I learned that being international isn't about blending in or losing your edges. It's about understanding the people around you, staying open to different perspectives, and still taking pride in where you come from. It taught me to appreciate perspectives shaped by upbringings vastly different from my own, not only in culture but also in circumstance, while giving me the confidence to stay true to where I come from." — Hayato

At high school graduation, that outlook earned Hayato his school's Global Citizen Award.

A privilege, not a burden

Hayato's parents raised him to persevere through an academically rigorous curriculum with a support network around him - rather than face bigger, higher-stakes challenges, like job uncertainty or skills gaps, later in life without that same support.

He made the most of it: an Extended Essay built around an aerospace airfoil experiment, a CAS-organised International Food Fair stall raising money through Japanese mini-games and snacks, and the week before his final IB exam - one last volunteering session at a Japanese Sunday school.

He didn't see the IBDP as something to weather. He saw it as a privilege: a structured, fully resourced two years that most people don't get the chance to explore and grow from.

"The school will provide all the resources you need, and there will be a very clear timeline laid out. All submissions, be that EE or TOK, will have clear guidelines and deadlines for micro tasks, which add up to the final write-up. Once you understand the overall expectations and the complete timeline, planning your workload becomes much more manageable. Finishing your IAs and EE experiments as fast as possible, preferably earlier than the summer before DP2, goes a long way. In reality, the IB workload is quite manageable when you break it down into individual tasks and follow a well-structured schedule to complete them." — Hayato

Where Revision Village came in

DP1 started with a standard textbook. Then came a ‘4’ on a maths test, and another in Chemistry. Classmates were already turning to Revision Village's Questionbank to prep for exam-style questions, and a teacher eventually pointed him there directly: “There's all those resources available to you - why not make use of them?" That's how he found the platform.

RV’s Questionbank built his habit of solving questions in any spare half hour he had. It highlighted what stuck and what didn't. With a gold membership, Video Solutions offered a deeper dive whenever a topic needed a refresher.

"The Revision Village videos always build up from first principles for every single video. Whenever I'd forgotten a topic, that was really helpful, especially for physics and for math. Some other platforms start the explanation with the theorem, and if I don't remember the theorem in the first place, I'm always going to get stuck." — Hayato

English presented a puzzle too. Classroom examples were never built the same way twice, and it was hard to tell what would consistently score well. Video Solutions' answer structure gave him something consistent enough to use under pressure.

"The way the answer was structured for English was really clearly laid out. I remember going through that exact template five minutes before my final exam. What a relief to see the pattern like, ‘oh, I know what's required of me here’." — Hayato

Finding his academic community

TU Delft is world-renowned for aerospace engineering and Hayato completed the university’s own entrance exams in maths, physics, and aerospace independent of the IB. He is on track to begin studying there this fall and has filled his summer with plenty of rewarding experiences.

Just recently he secured his driver's license through an intensive 2-week-long program, submitted research to a company that's sent rovers to the moon as an intern, and was the only high schooler at an academic conference hosting aerospace professors from Imperial College London and the University of Tokyo.

What he’d tell the next cohort

His advice: don’t confuse studying with learning. “A lot of my peers go through their notebook and textbook and think, 'I'm studying’. But knowing the content is different from being able to perform in the assessment. Although scoring the marks in the assessment should never be the goal, to perform well in those, you have to know how to convince the examiner you know what you're talking about.” That gap is exactly what he used the RV Questionbanks for.

What Hayato is most proud of

"Through experiences like my EE and CAS, IB pushed me to embrace unfamiliar challenges and gave me the confidence to step outside my condort zone. That confidence led me to take on projects outside the classroom - completing internships, joining individual research programs, and even cold emailing aerospace companies that weren’t even recruiting - and ultimately secure an research position through my own initiative. These experiences taught me to create opportunities rather than wait for them, a lesson I will carry with me for life." — Hayato

What’s next: the possibilities are endless

Hayato chose Aerospace engineering at TU Delft for its student-run “dream teams” that build rockets and hydrogen aircraft from scratch. After that, a master's likely on a new continent would provide a ‘new frontier’ of excitement, before eventually landing in Japan to work in aerospace, or at JAXA.

"My passion for aerospace engineering began long before I understood how an aircraft worked. The reason I decided to pursue aerospace was that seeing those planes take off or stepping aboard one gave me so much joy and excitement. Those moments still drive me ambition to join in the ranks of the engineers that brings aircrafts to life." — Hayato