Whether it is a sport or a club, it is nice to have a positive experience of meeting with a group of your friends and just doing the things you love. I recommend everyone to join any sort of extracurricular activity. For me, I am on the Walker Career Center’s Robotics team as one of the head programmers, and, through it, I have made a lot of friends and experiences that I’ll keep for the rest of my life.
What I love about Robotics is that there truly is a place for everyone. At first glance, it seems like just a place meant for people who just want to build a robot and have it compete. When you look deeper, there are so many moving parts of the team that are equally as captivating as building the robot. As a freshman, I thought that all I had to do was build a robot; I couldn’t have been farther from correct.
Currently, I am one of the heads of programming for the team. I fell in love with programming freshmen year when I joined the team, and I’ve loved it ever since. Though the job is extremely stressful, and it takes quick thinking and fast learning, I love the exhilaration of it. And on top of all of it, I have loved that my job, as complicated as it is, has extreme value on the team.
And that is the beauty of the team. We all have different strengths and weaknesses. Ashton and Keegan, heads of mechanical and machining, respectively, are great at physically making the robot, even down to which screw goes where. Tejas, head of electrical, is amazing at wiring the robot and making sure that it doesn’t blow up. Even Knight, the other head of programming, is really good at psuedocoding and planning the code out before typing it, something that I am not all that good at. But I also bring my strengths to the table, and at the end of the day, we all come together to create a robot that can compete and does extremely well.
This year is my senior year on the robotics team, and I wouldn’t have traded the experiences that I’ve had for anything in the world. From going to Worlds the first year I joined the team to even the simplest thing of tweaking small things in autonomous, I love the friends I’ve made along the way as well as the time I’ve spent with them. This is the joy that anyone could have if they joined an extracurricular activity as I did.