[thegnat05]

Keeping a team inclusive, from my experience, is challenging in all activities. From Quiz Bowl to Theatre to Speech there always seems to be an imbalance of some sort. My robotics team is not an exception to this. My freshman year there were 4 girls (including me) and my sophomore year there was 1. Being the only girl on the team that year really drove me to step up to the plate. I felt like in previous years the girls on the team would do the 'stereotypical' jobs such as marketing and nobody really asked them to help out with building the robot. Although I did design my teams t-shirts and buttons that year I also tried to help out my teammates with things like attaching an actuator to the robot or switching out a jag. After that year they started including me when making decisions about the robot or team in general. It was a really great year for me and my team as a whole.

This past year we had 6 new females join our team. I believe that we did it by showing our school when we were presenting that it wasn't just boys. I tried my best to talk to every girl that would come up to look at our robot and show them that girls are in robotics too. Our head mentor and team facilitator also tries to recruit girls. Well, he tries to recruit everyone he meets but girls especially.

I was one of our 4 captains last year and I am now the head captain of my team. I am not the captain because I am a girl, I am captain because I love FIRST and I put every ounce of my soul into the team. Having a girl captain has shown the other females on our team and in the community that engineering is not just a boy thing.

The best was to recruit new females is to show them inspired, excited, and involved females on the team and in FIRST!