Team 8727 and FRC robots

I was FIRST Robotics Competition obsessed in high school. I led my school team's mechanical subteam junior year; served as drive coach on the field; created the team's website; fundraised thousands of dollars; organized volunteers for local summer camps; and captained the team senior year. Outside of school, I read over 88,000 blog posts about FRC to become a better engineer, leader, and teammate.

Growing up in Asheville, FRC was the only exposure I had to engineering. Our team operated entirely on fundraised money (our public school provided us space to operate), and was made up of some 50 students of various backgrounds.

Senior year, the team earned recognition as the world's most sustainable (1st out of >3500 teams in 2024), winning more awards for team operational sustainability than any other in history.

Engineering contributions

I headed the hands-on design and construction of our 2023 robot: a 2 degree of freedom, 72-inch-reaching aluminum arm on a turreted base, mounted atop a 6 wheel "skid-steer" chassis. I led a team of 12 students in this process. The end assembly included a few hundred components that we machined using a lathe, CNC plasma cutter, 3-axis mill, and many hand tools. The robot made it to the state championships and won an excellence in engineering award.

In my senior year (2024), I was still involved with engineering, but only contributed to the early mechanism geometry of the CAD. After seeing how graduation kept forming losses of technical talent, I'd formed a new policy on prioritizing freshman and sophomore contributions to improve team engagement and skill retention after graduation. So, instead of doing technical work, I mentored new students in learning new skills and served in a project-management-adjacent role (I had to fix a lot of assembly mistakes, but that was fine).

That year, our robot was >90% underclassmen-built. Also, the team won the first two competitions in its history, back-to-back. Further, the team made it to the world championships for the first time. You can see the robot that did it in the top right corner.