First Robotics is my drug of choice
High Schools are full of teenagers who have no idea who they are or what they're passionate about. This strange time is perfect for discovering new reasons to push that homework aside and waste time doing something all your friends are doing! Everyone is encouraging you to reach outside your comfort zone and search for something you'll love, but its much easier to tag along on your friends adventures and hope they're into cool stuff. There's no way anything could happen if you just tried it once, right?
Stage 1: Experimentation- It's only one meeting, what could possibly happen?
Whether it was an announcement over your school's intercom, a eye catching poster, or a friend nagging you to just go to one meeting and try it out, somehow you ended up in a classroom full of socially awkward nerds having the time of their life. Strangely, you didn't immediately run as far away as you possibly could and instead signed in and took a seat. After some inspiring speeches by team mentors and captains you're already seeing yourself in their shoes in the next few years. This is when they invite everyone into the hall for a robot demonstration, aka the final nail in the coffin holding all your free time. Seeing the faces of the team members as their robot launches a Frisbee straight through an open door into an air vent has you convinced; Robotics can only bring joy and happiness and fun to your life.
Stage 2: Regular Social Gatherings- I'm really only here to hang out with my friends!
You've come home late for dinner again after your 5th robotics meeting and your family starts questioning why this is taking up so much of your time. Of course, you brush it off as no big deal. You're just hanging out with you're friends and having fun. You not even that into it, but it's nice to see your buds. Your parents really shouldn't be worried because you've made friends, isn't that what they wanted? That's what High School is about after all, making friends!
Stage 3: On the Brink- Yeah, mom I have to go in on Saturday to help test the code!
You still have an hour of free time for your non-robotics friends to play a game or two. You've had dinner with your family twice this week, and even doodled a dragon on a math test yesterday. You talk about robotics over lunch with your friends, but your dreams are still of your favorite books and movies. You related the poem in English to a childhood experience and not something that happened in the lab yesterday. You're on the precipice, you're comfortable and safe knowing you enjoy the activity but you enjoy other things too, just not as much.
Stage 4: Addiction/Dependency- 365 days until next year's FRC game is released and we haven't started prototyping!?
Its week 4 of build season and you've been wearing the same clothes for 3 days and you're surviving on a diet of pizza, soda, aluminum shavings, and gear grease. You haven't seen the sun is exactly 4 weeks and you've only seen your parents 3 times in the same span of time. You've been spending exactly 3 hours sleeping, 4 hours doing homework, 7 hours in class mentally working out the problems from yesterday's build, and 10 hours building and designing robots. Your teachers have noticed the papers you've turned in all have mechanical designs sketched into the margins and electrical diagrams across the back. Every moment not spent working on the bot, the code, or the wiring is a moment wasted. You live to tweak the shooter angle and clean up the electrical board. You day dream of rewriting the autonomous code and testing the sensors. Your life is robotics.
This addiction can take over your life, but it doesn't increase the chance you'll die before age 50 or make it more difficult for you to remember things you thought were important. This addiction teaches you to be independent and still work with a team. It helps you hone your time management while exercising your problem solving abilities. It lets you find something you're passionate about, get hands on experience in that field, and confidently know what your way around even the professional aspects of the field. Most of all, this addiction connects you with a family of others just as passionate and driven as you. People who want to go out and change the world and inspire others to be the same.
