Why did you join FIRST?

[ExarKun666]

In the year of 2008 I got sucked into the vortex known as FIRST. My chemistry teacher just randomly came up to me one day, and said, hey we are starting a robotics team here at the high school would you be interested. She described it as a project that you work on with members from JPL. My thoughts back then were: "Oh cool I can work on robotics, and do the stuff that JPL does like the Mars rover". Which I now think is a weird first thought to have. We started the club with just four members, including myself and we moved to little robots (half of the size of those used in FTC games). After that another teacher came in and told us about a competition in January, and the entire team [since it was or Rookie Year] had no idea what was going on until the kickoff day hit, and then we were thrown into the mess not knowing really where to start. We had sign ups for who wanted to be on drive build, attachments, programming,strategy,ect..., and I choose programming, which was odd back then because I felt obligated to despite the fact, that back then I hated programming because the only thing I ever programmed was 3D video game, which was extremely frustrating. As the club grew, the programming part of the team started with six, by the end of the second week, I was the last one in the programming group, but I did not pull out. We had very little mentor help, and the entire team didn't have much, if any experience with engineering. Through persistence and determination we got to the LA Regionals that year, and won the Rookie All-Star Award, went to Nationals in Atlanta, Georgia, and by that time we had grown to twenty members, we didn't win anything, but it was an incredible experience for our team! This second year we were placed 7th, and 6th seeded team. We didn't win any awards at the regionals, but this past second year was more of a learning experience to find out how to become a strong veteran team. I never regretting joining the club or just dropping out because of the lack of people in the club (in the beginning), and never wavered when it came to my tasks as the only programmer for the team for the past two years. Since I am a senior this past year I had to choose a replacement, which was the hardest thing to do, knowing that I was being replaced, and that I was leaving as a student competitor. On the brighter side, I do plan to come back and mentor when I can during college, and later on as well.