If you’ve read my About Me tab already then you’ll know that for seven years of my life I was obsessed with the world of STEAM. Innovation and creativity drove my passion for robotics, and I had an undying dedication to the teams I was involved in. You can learn more about the team that ate up most of my time here. My mom keeps telling me that the only thing that prepared her for my absence in our house after I moved across state lines to go to college was how much more time I spent in my school’s robotics lab than I spent at home in high school. It was like I had already moved out by my sophomore year because once I picked up a project I was passionate about I just couldn’t let it go. I have since transferred that dedication over to the world of communication. As much as I loved spending late nights soldering in a dimly lit corner of our machine shop, I knew that my future would not be in engineering. Nonetheless, my heavy involvement in STEAM still built up the basic foundation skills that are necessary for someone to succeed in the field of communications.
As mentioned above, the most obvious skill that I developed through my experience in the field of robotics is dedication. I refused to leave the shop until we had discovered a solution to any problem we were facing. This led to many late nights and a shaky relationship with the janitors. Not many students on the team liked public speaking in the slightest. Whether it be answering questions about the functionality of our robot to judges, networking with other teams, or presenting progress reports to sponsors, no one ever seemed confident in communicating what they know. This hesitance to advocate the successes and failures of our team is what drove me to ultimately discover my passion for communications. I saw a gap that needed to be filled in our team and I took it upon myself to assume these positions to uplift our image. I have presented to a packed auditorium without stage fright, I have put myself out there to establish connections with other teams, and I have confidently held technical conversations with judges and sponsors despite how intimidated I felt on the inside. Developing these skills did not happen overnight, but over the course of my seven years in competitive robotics I developed the foundational skills for success: dedication, presentation, and formal or informal conversation.
So how does this experience make me unique? The years I spent in middle school and high school learning how to troubleshoot, identifying a problem and coming up with a solution, and asking questions like “How does this work?,” “Why is this not working?,” and “How can I improve this?” impact how I approach communications. The way my mind works is much more similar to how an engineer’s mind works than how a communicator’s mind works. And I think that that unique perspective allows me to view projects and issues with a different mindset and provide creative solutions that otherwise might not be identified by people whose perspectives have always been geared towards communications.