A few words of reflection on FTC

we are an award-winning high school robotics team composed of NINE students based in Princeton, New Jersey. though we are a COMPETITIVE team, our main goal is to inspire. we do outreach events at various locations to promote first and get people interested in STEM. each one of our students is learning important skills such as engineering, marketing, programming and many more which will prepare us for our future careers in these fields.

Being the founder of the team, I have been growing in and with the team for the past year. My experiences gained in the previous years of competitions in FIRST and expertise in mechanical engineering were two out of many helpful advantages of mine. These resources assisted me in putting the team together as well as leading this very first FIRST robotics team in our school. We are one of the top performers among all in the events that we participated.

What I have learned throughout the journey simply cannot be prized. People that I have met in these events were being extensively helpful to us. I believe this is what FIRST's spirit is all about. I have gained abilities that include but are not limited to promotiveness, positivity, and leadership in many other various ways. Finding and solving problems is another ability that I took one step further during this quarter of the campaign. However, there are still limitations to our team. For example, since we are a school with intensive and heavily focused STEM courses, we typically don't have hours of time, and most of our team members are day students who cannot stay long after school ends. Moreover, because we are a "rookie" team according to many people, there were not many companies or individuals who want to sponsor the team. On the other hand, we didn't let that stop us and don't plan to.