Life of a FIRST Robotics Member

[Kevin Leonard]

The most exciting thing has to be the dawning that what my team did, what I helped do- went 15-0 and won the Connecticut Regional.

The rush of realizing that we built an amazing robot that can compete with the big dogs. That's when I knew that I really wanted to pursue engineering for a career.

The most annoying, frustrating thing is when students (and mentors for that matter) feel like it's hopeless. When I was expressing my optimism to a friend that next year could be our year to finally make Einstein- being that we have the right group of students and knowledge, I had a 1st year mentor tell em that we couldn't because we don't have a big sponsor like NASA or Chrysler that we build with. He told me, that we couldn't compete with them because of that.
That was the most frustrating thing, because with all the work we put in, with the kind of robot we built, he was telling me that we couldn't possibly contend with the likes of 33 or 254.

I'm still hopeful, but I can't lie, he really disappointed me.