I found out about our team in 8th grade, when I became best friends with a girl who had a brother on the team at the time. She had gone to some of their meetings and had a team shirt. I don't know why, but I thought that that shirt was the coolest thing since sliced bread. So at the beginning of our freshman year, after she assured me that there were things to do with the team that didn't involve building the robot (I didn't think I was experienced enough), I went to the introductory meeting and signed up.
All I really remember about the first few months of that fall was that the meetings were extremely boring (learning about the difference between programming loops really sucks when you neither know nor care about programming). I didn't go down into the shop until the second-to-last work session of the year, and I only went because one of the mentors commented on the lack of girls in the shop and I didn't have much to lose by going. Somehow, I managed to be totally hooked by the time kickoff came around, and I have been ever since.
Now that I think about it, if I had been able to go to the off-seasons that first fall, I probably would have been hooked sooner, but that's all in the past now
