Project Context + Goals

I was a part of FIRST Robotics for all four years of high school — I first started on FTC as a freshman, and then did FRC for the remaining three years.

Joining this team gave me my first exposure to engineering. I had worked primarily on the mechanical team and picked up SolidWorks/ basic CAD skills, as well as basic machining skills by helping manufacture our parts in our school's machine shop. Over the years, I ended up in various leadership roles, and through that, grew my project management and communication skills as well.

My Contributions

In terms of technical contributions, I fully owned the drivetrain design in my senior year (pictured below). We decided to pivot to a "West-Coast" style drivetrain (there's usually a "drop" on the motorized wheels in order to make pivoting easier), different from our previous years, and I successfully designed and built our first one!

In terms of leadership contributions, I was able to increase member rentention rates, created a mentorship program for female members, and update & unify our team branding for the first time since the team was founded ten years ago.

Key Learnings

A lot of what I learned on FIRST Robotics in high school are some fundamentals to the engineer process that still hold true now that I'm in industry:

• It's typically more beneficial to design, build and test quickly to fail fast than to be stuck in analysis-paralysis
• It's important to build subcomponents and integrate subsystems along the way rather than at the end to discover design issues (relating to integration) that need to be fixed along the way
• If there's a fault, it's generally electrical's problem ;)

Robot Overview

Robot Photos