Personal Narrative: My Involvement On The First Robotics Team

Over the course of my High School career, I was a member of the FIRST Robotics team. My involvement on the FIRST Robotics team has personally given me experience in many values of a liberal education. My experience has allowed me to communicate with all my teammates, connect with others, appreciate the design process, and solve problems together. On the Robotics team we had many subgroups named “corps”, there was fabrication, design, media, software, and hardware. Although there were these five corps, we had to communicate together to build one robot. In order to execute this we had to communicate exceptionally well between each group and listen and hear what each group had to say. For example, if design was trying to place a motor on the robot, but the wiring would not allow for it, hardware would have to explain to design why it would not work, and attempt to come up with a compromise or a new idea that would succeed. Moreover, we had to communicate with everyone on the team, there was a wide range of experience on the team, ranging from people with no experience coming into their first year of robotics to mentors with their bachelor's degree in engineering and work experience. We had to be able to communicate with everyone so that they would be able to
Working as a team enabled me to understand different viewpoints, and work together to come up with the best solution. Working as a team also increased my knowledge and understanding and I became a more enlightened person from this. In order to create the best robot for competitions our team had to practice self-criticism. We could not be stubborn with our own ideas and solutions, rather we had to understand the pros and cons of everything and work for a solution from that. Working as a team, we had to understand everyone’s strengths and weaknesses, and assign them tasks based on their strong