[FRC4ME]

My senior year (2009) on my high school team, 339. We had won Delphi DTT for a completely student-designed component at a regional and were quite excited about it. It was, at the time, the FIRST award that meant the most to me, personally.

By the end of Friday at Championships, everyone in the pit had been eager demonstrating the component to the judges. We were quite passionate about it, but ultimately we had to focus on playing the game. Saturday morning, the judges were visiting our pit multiple times. Rumors started going around...why are they so interested? Do you think we could...nah, don't be silly. There are 400+ of the best teams in the world here. They've got flywheels, gyroscopes, and propellers. There's no way our little moving platform could be worthy of international recognition. We've never won a CMP award before.

We didn't make the eliminations, and our head mentor wanted to leave early to make sure we could catch our flight. We begged him to wait until the announcement of awards, as a sort of wishful thinking. He ultimately agreed that we could stay until 6:00 PM, but no later. So we were watching the matches on Einstein interspersed with award presentations. At 5:58 PM (seriously), they get to Delphi DTT. And as the presenter began his speech, he included in his first sentence a clue that left no doubt: we had won.

The twenty seconds of disbelief as the presenter finished his speech, the almost tearful cheering as our representatives accepted the award, and the sixty seconds of hugging among team members that followed, were truly indescribable. Our first international award in ten years of existence, for the design of a component I was directly involved in creating. With such an amazing cap, I cannot look back on my experience as a student in FIRST as anything less than perfect.