[Tom Bottiglieri]

My first year participating in high school on 195 (this was about 10 years ago, mind you), our robot was 100% mentor built. No joke, we met with the engineers on the first day of the build and they delivered a robot 6 weeks later.

Regardless of that, we went to the competitions and had tons of fun, it was great. We had some great team leaders and mentors who encouraged us to just soak in everything about the competition. We won an event that year and that got a bunch of us really pumped to try and help the next year.

Many students from that team have gone on to complete degrees in engineering and now work at places like Microsoft, Lockheed Martin, United Technologies, Amazon, and bay area startups. I think the "Inspiration" (you know, the whole point of this program) was successful.