[iamthetallpaul]

Let me preface by saying that this is my first and last year with FIRST. I was recruited to be the programmer after my team's was graduated last year. The robotics team at my school is seen with kinda a stigma and I'm more of a closet nerd than anything else but I signed up anyway, with no notion of what I was getting into, mostly to pad my resume.

Until yesterday, Saturday, at Waterloo, thet season could have ended at anytime and I wouldn't have given it a second thought. But I had such a blast at Waterloo, doing things completely opposite from what I usually think are fun. Yeah, I have a confession, I'm one of the kids whose friends would make fun of kids on robotics. Yet it's Sunday morning, I'm back home, and I'm pretty sad that it's all over. I met some amazing girls at Waterloo (<3 for Team 771) and spent a lot of the time I was away from our pit hanging out with them. But the moment it was all worth it for me, the saturday afternoons I spent in the shop, missing an amazing party for Great Lakes, the frustration of watching our bot pour out smoke like a chimney (also at GLR), after match 59 at Waterloo. It all worked. We went into a match against Team 68 fully expecting to lose, expecting a motor to fail or the balls to jam, but for those two minutes and ten seconds everything was perfect, our alliance worked together, and we won.

So yeah, I'm sad that it's over. I hated a lot of things about my team, and about FIRST, all of which have been beaten to death on this board (team politics, the triplets, engineers building bots, the metric of GP), but I don't regret the experience. I only regret that I didn't join sooner, and that I won't be around next year.

Maybe I should drive to GTR...