Why I Participate in Competitions?

The Core: Beyond the Code

 

​When people first see a robot perform perfectly — gliding, turning, and grabbing objects with precision — they usually see success. What they don’t see are the countless nights behind it: code that didn’t compile, gears that jammed, and sensors that refused to cooperate. For me, robotics competitions were never just about building machines. They were about building myself.

​

I joined my first FRC (FIRST Robotics Competition) team as a shy and underprepared student. I still remember standing by the workbench, watching my teammates write code I couldn’t understand and discuss strategies that sounded like another language. I was almost dismissed from the team for not knowing enough. That moment stung—but it also lit something inside me.

​

I decided that if I couldn’t be the most naturally talented, I would be the most determined. I started spending nights after school debugging and rebuilding, often until the security guard flicked the lights to remind me to go home. Each time something broke, I learned something new — not just about circuits or torque, but about resilience.

​

The Grind and the Breakthrough

 

People talk about "the learning curve," but for me, it felt more like a learning cliff. I didn't come from a background with a home 3D printer or a father who taught me C++ at age ten. I started from absolute zero. My first attempt at a simple autonomous routine was a disaster—the robot just spun in circles until it slammed into a wall. Embarrassing? Absolutely. But it was also my most important failure. It taught me the crucial distinction between theory (the elegant code I copied from a tutorial) and reality (the messy world where friction, battery voltage, and uneven carpet conspire against you).

​

I spent an entire season focused on mastering just one subsystem: the manipulator arm. I modeled it in CAD hundreds of times, testing different joint configurations and motor ratios. I learned to love the smell of burning metal from the soldering iron and the quiet satisfaction of a perfect weld. I realized that true expertise is built in small, often painful increments, not in sudden flashes of genius. It was in those long, quiet hours—the ones no one ever sees—that the real magic happened. I wasn't just fixing the robot; I was forging a new way of thinking: analytic, meticulous, and stubbornly optimistic.

​

The deeper I went, the more I realized robotics competitions are less about competition and more about connection. We are students from different schools, countries, and even languages — but when we meet at an FRC arena, we speak the same one: innovation. I have built robots with teammates from Shanghai, exchanged parts with teams from Australia, and once shared strategies with a rival team right before facing them in the finals.

​

This spirit of Gracious Professionalism—the philosophy FRC is built on—is what keeps me coming back. It’s the understanding that we are all playing a challenging game and the ultimate victory is advancing the field of human ingenuity together. When your biggest rival needs a spare part to make it to the finals, you hand it over. Not because it’s the nice thing to do, but because their success challenges you, and that challenge is the point. The friendships and mentorships forged in the chaos of the pit area are the truly non-transferable prizes of the whole experience. I can still call up a friend from a team in Taiwan to talk through a complex inverse kinematics problem, years after we last faced off on the competition field. That's the real win.

​

Winning has never been the real reason I compete. I participate because robotics gives me a space where effort truly matters. It rewards those who stay curious, who aren’t afraid to fail in front of others, and who dare to try again when everything seems lost.