Question of the Week!!! (5/24/04)

[Joe3]

The most dificult aspect of this season for me was the transition from Pit Crew to Competition team. On our team, we have set people who are chosen to be on each, and they are mutually exclusive. In the past, I had always been on pit crew, and I really enjoyed the challanges that it offered. From rebuilding a 10' wing in 20 mins on MOEhawk in 2002 to the constant rapid maintenance of GeroniMOE to keep it stacking, there was a continuous flow of challanges that offered themselves to be completed. This year, however, I expressed my interest in Competition Team. The past year, I had disagreed with many of the on-field decisions made by the comp team, so I decided that "well, of course I can do better than that", so I wanted to be on Comp team. As fate would have it, I passed all of the requirements and was selected to be the arm, kilt, and everything else but wheels driver. This, too I enjoyed, along with the immense amount of stress and pressure it carried with it. The experiance also gave me another perspective on how difficult it is to make strategy decisions on the fly, and make the robot do exactly what you want it to do. Although...while I have a greater appreciation as to why all those "other" MOE drivers made the decisions they did, I still think they were wrong /sarcasm