MTHS senior turns setbacks into winning state championship in STEM contest

After five years of late nights, sliced fingers and shattered wood, Mountlake Terrace High senior Tony Lopez Hernandez has turned early failures into a state title and a lasting lesson in perseverance.

The structural stress tester in the STEM wing whirled and groaned. Hernandez, sleeves rolled high, watched the digital readout climb past 500 pounds. When the balsa wood finally explodes in a sharp crack, he doesn’t flinch. Instead he smiles. Another design has told him exactly where it died, and that means the next one will last longer.

Hernandez first saw a Technology Student Association (TSA) plaque in his brother’s hands back in 2018. “I got interested because of my brother coming home with a plaque from Yakima,” he said. “And to show people that I can do anything while having dyslexia because many people doubted my success in anything, and showing that Latinos can succeed in STEM.”

In middle school, a simple balsa cube project changed everything. His first cube held just 23 pounds. With help from STEM teacher Mr. Sullivan, Hernandez redesigned it, stayed after school and eventually maxed out the class machine – twice – at its 1,000-pound limit. 

“He told me that throughout his years of teaching, I was the first to max out his machine twice,” Hernandez said.

Every structures season begins the same way. Hernandez reads the rules, sketches a design and makes a precise cut list. He would slice the balsa wood strips with an X-Acto knife on his personal cutting board. Then he would glue the sides of the wood pieces first with pink or purple BSI super glue before gluing the horizontal supports. Finally, he would sand it until every face is mirror-flat.

“Cutting the wood is my favorite part,” Hernandez said. “I listen to my music and know what I’m doing.” Gluing and sanding take the longest, he said. One misaligned joint means starting over.

Hernandez got a breakthrough in his junior year when he won the Washington state Structural Engineering title – the only first-place finish out of 120 competitors that year – and qualified for nationals. In the preliminaries, his tower held 528 pounds with an efficiency score of 17,800, which is calculated by using the weight held in grams divided by structure mass in grams.

However, Hernandez received a hard blow in the nationals when his partner repeatedly missed the sessions. The night before the state departure, Hernandez sliced his finger open on a super-glue bottle cap, left a trail of blood across campus and finished the structure at 3:50 a.m. At the nationals, the tower slipped during testing; they finished 18th out of 20 in the semifinals. 

“I felt horrible knowing I choked so badly,” he said. The lesson: Choose committed teammates and enforce strict timelines.

Now a five-year veteran, Tony guides novices one-on-one through rules and sketches. “Have a lot of grit because it’s hard, and there were many times I wanted to give up,” he said to them.

After graduating this spring, Tony will head to a four-year university in fall 2026 to study mechanical engineering. His mantra remains: “Grit and learning from your failures equals success.”