I first realized that I was not just a destructive child who liked breaking things apart when I was eleven years old. I programmed a Lego robot to do something I wasn’t sure if it could actually do, and lost my mind when it did it.
It was my first robotics competition, and I had never worked on a robot before. I had no idea what I was doing. But when the robot navigated the course and launched a ball into a goal, I realized I wasn’t just a household appliance-breaking juvenile delinquent; I was an engineer!
First Lego League and the Shot That Changed Everything
FIRST Lego League is a program for elementary and middle school students where teams build and program small Lego-based robots to complete challenges on a competition field. Each year has a different theme, a different course, different obstacles, and different tasks. Each task is worth a different number of points depending on difficulty, so you have to choose carefully which tasks you attempt.
That first year, one of the highest-scoring tasks required the robot to start at home base, navigate a course full of obstacles, and then launch a ball up and over a little wall into a goal on the other side. No human input was allowed, the robot had to move autonomously based on whatever code and hardware you’d built.
I was the only one on my team working on that task. Although I got it to work a few times in practice, it was never consistent. It would work, then fail, then work again.
Then competition day came, and it worked.
I remember holding my breath watching it run the course. When the ball cleared the wall and dropped into the goal, my teammates and I went crazy. I’d never felt anything quite like that: not just relief, but something closer to, “This is the thing I want to do.”
Learning to Work as a Team
That early spark carried into high school, where I joined the Windward School FIRST Robotics Competition team, the Omnicats, as a mechanism lead. The scale was completely different from the Lego League. We were building a 125-pound robot from scratch, working with a team of around forty students, and the engineering decisions were a lot more complicated.
One of the biggest lessons I took from that experience had nothing to do with the robot itself. Three mechanism leads each developed a different design for the ball launcher. I thought mine was the strongest option, it was faster, more accurate, and had better range. The team voted… and picked a different one.
And then I was asked to build it.
That was a formative moment. You make your case, and sometimes the team goes another direction. Your job then is to make that design the best it can possibly be. And that’s part of learning to work on a team. You don’t whine, you don’t complain, you just do your best every day to support the team.
Why Early Access Matters
Looking back, I feel genuinely lucky to have had access to programs like FIRST Lego League and FIRST Robotics Competition. Not every kid does, and I think that’s really unfortunate, especially in today’s world.
For me, these programs provided the spark that ignited my passion for robotics and engineering. I’m sure that I would have found my way to engineering eventually. But having access to hands-on programs early meant I didn’t have to wait to find out what I loved. I got to start.
Those experiences taught me important lessons that I hadn’t yet learned in the classroom. That trying something and failing is not the end, it’s just the beginning. That the tenth attempt might work when the first nine didn’t. That engineering is definitely not about getting things right the first time, it’s about staying curious long enough to figure it out.
Now I’m a graduate student at Purdue studying astrodynamics and mission design and working on classroom projects about trajectory optimization for deep space missions.
The problems look a lot different than they did when I was eleven. But the feeling of excitement that I get when I solve something really hard is the same. And that’s how I know I’ve found my path.