Before high school, my dream was to become a marine biologist and study octopuses and mantis shrimp. But once I tried out the FRC team at my new high school, I was hooked in a matter of days. I quickly picked up skills in mechanical handwork, took a machining class, and researched electronics and microcontroller programming on my own. In my sophomore year, I started CADding more and more in an effort to bring the level of the team up by using advanced CAD techniques that we had not used in our 16-year history. But alas, that sophomore year ended in an immobile robot and barely getting into quarterfinals as an inbounder for 2014 (and as a 16-year old team!), destroying the team and myself in spirit. But those of us who continued on to the next year vowed to do better in the future and fix our lacking mechanical department, and so I embarked on a 2,000+ hour CAD journey to try and be the best at CAD that I possibly could be, and I think it was then that I decided that I wanted to be a mechanical engineer.
In the end, I don't think I fixed all the problems, or even most of them. With greater CAD and machining skills came greater complexity and more risks. 2015 had few problems design-wise and turned out to be my favorite and most effective bot, but by comparison 2016 was near-disaster. That being said, I greatly value the amount I've learned through repetitive CAD and reiteration, and not just getting suggestions and tips and answers from CD through the last 3 years (shoutout to the people who commented on my swerve drives in efforts to make them better
). Ultimately, I think the most valuable thing I learned from CAD is that it is the perfect tool for fleshing out ideas, and it taught be so much about the engineering process and thinking outside the box. My spatial skills and creativity have improved leaps and bounds due to CAD, and my experience with Solidworks is one that would be hard to match doing anything else. I'm planning on using CAD and learning more long into the future!