It all starts with FIRST. Way back when I was 14, I was interested in writing and wanted to be a journalist or an author of some sort. I joined FRC because my siblings had done it and I idolized them. I started off doing writing-related tasks, but one day the older students offered welding lessons which got me out of the computer lab and into the shop.

I started by doing simple tasks to help the older students: cutting things, drilling things, screwing things together, and my main focus became learning to weld and being the team’s welder. One year was a rough year for welding, so I decided I wanted to be the one who decided how the robot was built (so I could control what I was welding). I asked a lot of different people for help and slowly learned to CAD and design robots. By my senior year, I was the team’s chief robot designer and welder. When I graduated high school, I was all set to go into mechanical engineering.

I started college in the fall of 2011 at Iowa State University. At orientation, the advisors went over various first semester courses that we would be taking. One of the introductory classes we had to take was a problem solving course. Because you could take any problem solving course and have it count towards your major, I decided to take the one for computer engineers because it taught C programming and I wanted to learn a “real” programming language. As it turned out, I really liked that class and I really enjoyed coding. After comparing the different majors, I decided to switch to computer engineering about a month or two into freshman year.

After my freshman year, I took on a role with the university in my home town to work as a research assistant; a position I got because of one of my FRC mentors. There I got to flex my new coding muscles by creating an interface showing the input from various sensors. It wasn’t incredibly challenging work, but it was one of my first times using my education outside of school.

I became a teaching assistant (TA) for Intro to C courses my sophomore year, which solidified and expanded my knowledge of the language, as well as gave a me a job I love. It also opened the door for me to work with a program called “Road Less Traveled” which is a university sponsored program for girls in middle school and high school to experiment with different career paths in a one-day event.

After my junior year, I was able to get an internship working for Amazon.com, which was a pretty cool experience. I’m now in my senior year, finishing up classes so I can graduate!

Aside from my parents, my sister has been one of the biggest influences in my life. She was part of the group of people who started the FRC team at my high school, and she was also the first female engineer in my life. My welding mentor believed in me and supported me throughout high school and on through college. There was actually a time in high school where I didn’t want to go to college, but he was the one who successfully encouraged me to go to school. My other FRC mentors have been important, as they were a resource for asking more about school/engineering. I would even ask them for help with my programming homework in college.

I wouldn’t be where I was if it weren’t for me trying something new: taking that intro to C class. I honestly never thought I would be interested in or smart enough to be a computer engineer, but now that I’m in it, I can’t imagine a better fit.

I can’t speak for getting girls on robotics teams as students or mentors, because I have no data/experience to back up any claims. I’ve witnessed, however, that hands on experience as an effective tool for getting girls interested in STEM. With the Road Less Traveled event, we bring girls in for an hour or two, and have them play around with code. They don’t have to write code or understand how everything works, but we give them some code that interacts with a game controller and ask them to try and change it to make it do something slightly different. Because it’s so short, there is no commitment. Because we aren’t asking them to redesign the wheel, it’s not overwhelming. Talking to the girls afterwards, it seems to have a positive effect.

I’ve noticed a lot of girls (including my friends, my students, and myself) get caught up in the fear of “I don’t know all of it already,” and allow the thought to prevent them from doing something. One student this year, in the first week of class, was terrified she would fail because she didn’t know how to code… even though it is an intro to coding class! I’m not sure why I’ve noticed this more in girls than boys, but when recruiting, it should be addressed that one doesn’t need to know everything/anything to join robotics because anything there is to know will be taught.