The Great (And Sleepy) Grant Imahara

Somehow, today YouTube recommended me a very interesting video regarding one of the TV shows I loved to watch when I was a teenager: Mythbusters.



For those who don’t know, Mythbusters is a TV show about a bunch of engineers testing the plausibility of urban myths, such as ‘will gas pumps explode if you use you phone near it?’ or ‘can you survive in a falling elevator if you jump just moments before it hit the ground?’

Part of the charm of the series is the hosts, which are not only knowledgeable, but are also very funny and entertaining.

Now, as the title of this post reveals, I want to write about one of the them: Grant Imahara (GI). Why? Well, because YouTube recommended a video about him haha.

The video list many of the achievements by Grant outside of Mythbusters. Apparently, he was an employee with Industrial Light & Magic, a special effects studio that worked on high-profile movies such as Star Wars, Jurassic Park etc.

He created many movie props and machineries. The most notable one would be R2-D2 for the Star Wars prequels.

Other than that, he also created numerous robots throughout his career. From the Energizer bunny to combat robots, it seemed like this guy was an engineering maestro.

Throughout the first four-fifths of the YouTube video, as the video showed accomplishments after accomplishments by GI, I thought, “wow, this guy must be so smart. I bet he killed it during his engineering studies in university.”

Then up to that point, it was as if the video read my thoughts and showed how GI completed his studies.

So apparently, he was struggling during his engineering study in University of Southern California. He fell asleep during classes, lost focus and disliking the whole thing.

To solve his problem, his counselor asked him to meet with a lecturer (Tomlinson Holman), who was a professor of cinematic arts, and that changed GI’s perception. He revived his passion for engineering and learned a lot from Holman.

He later scored an internship with THX thanks to the lecturer, which later turned into a full-time job after he completed his studies.

This surprised me. He was definitely a genius, but the fact that he was a student who lost focus during his studies made me realise he was probably just like the majority of the students who kind of didn’t know what to do with their lives and had to go to university just in the hope of scoring a job after graduating.

I can kind of relate to this because I took engineering at university too, and somehow, I never found it to be very interesting. I only went through it with a hope that I can get a stable and legitimate job when I’m older.

Turned out, I was not even an engineer after graduation. I chose a career in journalism for my first job and I was happy with it. Well, until the company closed down one-and-a-half year later, unfortunately.

I am now working in a PR agency. I am still learning the ropes so I hope I will be good at it.

While I am no longer working in engineering, I still watch engineering-related videos during my free time (which is how I got recommended with the GI video, I guess). It’s amazing how meeting someone can affect his life’s direction and it led him to where he is now.

Will I meet someone in the future who will revive my passion in engineering? Who knows. But I do have what I have now, and I want to make the best out of it.