Robotics

Leadership and Robots

It was absurdly lucky that my high school happened to be home to one of the world's most successful high-school robotics teams (FRC 1678: https://www.citruscircuits.org). As a nerdy kid who'd just learned to code (from the internet, and an even-nerdier friend), I was thrilled that in my first year, I learned to write robotic control code in C++ and image processing code in Java. At the end of the year, the student leadership graduated, I was asked to step in the following year to lead the application programming subdivision that writes software for collecting, analyzing, and presenting data during tournament play. A graduating senior spent time with me over the summer teaching me about iOS programming, which I’d never tried before.

I did my best with my meager leadership and mobile development skills, but at the first competition my software team and I floundered; apps crashed and data was lost. The team was disappointed in our performance and in me. On the way home I had a much-needed cry and promised myself I would learn from my mistakes. At the next meeting, I made a debrief: To be successful, I needed to improve my communication, hold stricter deadlines, and empower my team to meet them. That season we improved but still underperformed. Junior year, leveraging older teammates' greater experience in database and server design, I spearheaded the process of redesigning our technical infrastructure. When one programmer became a group-dynamics problem, I addressed it with him directly but respectfully, and his behavior improved. That year, my team had more synergy and created a solid product, which contributed to the team winning the world championships that year. 

Senior year, I was the team captain and managed 80 students in six subdivisions, while also running weekly leadership meetings. That year I was challenged in several ways: I had to give constructive criticism to a verbally aggressive adult mentor whose mannerisms sometimes damaged team morale, I did a presentation (public speaking was very difficult for me at the time) on which tens-of-thousands of the team's funding dollars were riding, and I worked to mentor younger students to become more prepared to lead than I had been. I’m very grateful for the opportunity I had through robotics to practice project management, leadership, and professional communication (as well as software engineering) at a level of intensity that’s exceedingly rare for a high-school program. Thanks to my mother’s profession as a leadership coach, I had the support necessary to learn deeply from the experience rather than be overwhelmed by it. I’ve continued to develop each of these skills in college and will probably be working on them for the rest of my life.