Prague senior Frank Provaznik has been building things since he was little.
He recalled using Legos and other toys to create things as a child, sometimes things that no one else thought of. Then, he went to a STEM event hosted by Gordon Cooper Technology Center.
“(It) was just a little kiddy thing where you make something that’ll go down like a zip line type thing. And it’s just, basic intro to engineering. And ever since then, I really, really enjoyed that.”
Provaznik has been attending the pre-engineering program at Gordon Cooper since he was a sophomore and is the president of the pre-engineering class as well as the robotics build team, where he’s also hardware lead. Frank joked that he didn’t really get a chance to choose robotics.
“I was doing band at Prague, and my instructor had wanted me in robotics that year, but with band, I kind of didn’t want to get into it because too much was happening. The end of sophomore year, my instructor kind of told me that he signed me up,” he said with a chuckle.
Frank isn’t complaining. He enjoys designing and building robots, then going to competitions. There are four left this year, and he’s gunning for nationals again. That is his No. 1 priority at the moment.
The competitions can get intense -- while Frank says his team is pretty wellfunded, there are others that blow them out of the water as they’re sponsored by NASA and other major companies.
Despite the intensity and drive to win, the competitions are still very friendly.
“Part of the rules of being there, you will get disqualified if you’re not nice. So it’s very competitive, but it’s good,” he said.
Even when things don’t work out, the senior enjoys building and designing. Last year, he engineered an elevator for the robot that extended from three feet to eight feet.
“And I guess it’s not necessarily cool, but when we were in worlds at competition, the elevator frames just kind of fell out. And that’s not, that’s not good, but it was hilarious. It was just kind of neat to see something happen,” he said.
Provaznik garnered an award for engineering inspiration for the elevator, as he had built it in a way that hadn’t been done before. In fact, the elevator took a lot of trial and error. Frank said he spent about three to four weeks building it one way before he had to scrap and start completely over.
“You go in with a bunch of really good ideas, but some of them just can’t work out, and it always proves itself,” he said.
While he doesn’t plan to go into robotics, Frank is planning to continue with engineering, saying that his classes at Gordon Cooper have helped prepare him for what’s to come. The senior is on track to hopefully be valedictorian at Prague High School. He’s also already been admitted to Oklahoma State University, where he plans to get a degree in mechanical engineering. After that, Frank hopes to get a master’s and then go into the defense industry.
However, when he’s not in class or building robots, you’ll find him at home, helping out on the family farm. They have cows and horses, and Frank bales hay in the summer, along with other work. While it seems to be a bit of a contradiction, he said working on the farm has helped him with engineering.
“(A) Whole life of growing up farming kind of taught the discipline to it. So it keeps me on track. And I guess from a young age of doing that, I got the work ethic of like, if it’s got to be done, it’s got to be done. So back and forth, it’s pretty, it’s meshed pretty good. But it’s different. It’s completely different tasks, but it’s, I mean, growing up doing it, it makes it easy to just transfer between them,” he said.
The biggest struggle, Frank said, has been figuring out the best way to study as well as time management. He’s in advanced classes like Calculus II,AP Physics, Aerospace and mechanical engineering. The classes are harder, and senior year has been very busy. Though it helps that he’s had an instructor who encouraged him.
Frank called Mr. Markham his “number one” teacher, saying, “if it wasn’t for him, then I wouldn’t have skills and machining and just, like, starting to design things and CAD and stuff like that.” Markham is the instructor who put him in robotics and has been Provaznik’s primary engineering teacher at Gordon Cooper.
If there is any advice he could give to underclassmen, it’s this: “Take all the opportunities you can. Don’t try to hold back from anything.”
While it’s good to have some free time and you don’t want to work all the time, it’s in those moments where Frank has been involved in something that he really started learning.
“Don’t pull yourself out of opportunities because they’re really everywhere.”
This is the latest in the Senior Spotlight series, highlighting senior students from all of the high schools in the Lincoln County News coverage area.