Embarking Robotics

Like any other student at the beginning of freshman year, I joined many of the clubs that the school had to offer, not really knowing what each club was about. Coming out of middle school and doing robotics in my eighth grade year, I thought to my self, why not join the high school team? Little did I know that the next four years would be the best time that I would ever had been part of such a great program.

Starting in my freshman year, I joined the team being a part of our programming team. This was the time when I thought to myself "oh, I think I like computer science". Because my freshman year was during Covid, the meetings we had for the programming sub-team only took place in Zoom calls. I did not like it. The meetings were 2 hours long and every minute, I found myself pondering about something else and not giving my full attention to learn how to program.

Going into my sophomore year, I continued to stay on the programming team, hoping that at some point I would learn to love programming. This was definitely not the case. All throughout the pre-season (fall semester), whenever I was told to program something new, due to my lack of knowledge, I turned to copying code. Of course this never worked out because I did not even know what I was copying. At this point in robotics, I gave up on programming.

One day, I decided that programming was no longer for me and decided to walk myself over to the mechanical sub-team. As a hand-on learner, I knew that this was what I was supposed to be doing, not programming. I remember on that day I walked over to join the mechanical team, no one really took notice. I had already blended in amongst the other members. This was great. The first thing I did working in mechanical was operate the drill press that we had. I watched first as a senior of the team was drilling holes into a piece of tubing that we had. Everything came so fluid to me. It was super easy for me to catch on and learn how to use the drill press. This most likely had come from the fact that I worked a lot with my father. My father used a lot of tools for the work that he did, and I learned how to use those tools (power drill, jig saw, etc.) just from watching him. Of course, because I was with him to help him with work, I was also able to get hands-on with the tools. This gave me a huge advantage in being a part of the mechanical team. When most of the students were now just learning how to operate the basic tools, I already had the knowledge.

Since then I have not returned back to our programming team. Thankfully the one things I did learn about myself when joining robotics was that I was not the type of person to sit down with a laptop and write lines of code. It was difficult for me to focus on the task at hand.