Dean's List Highlight: Anika Yardi

2016 Dean’s List Award Winner Anika Yardi was chosen to speak at the 2016 Supporters Summit this past July. The Supporter Summit runs in conjunction with the Dean’s List Summit, where the 10 FIRST Tech Challenge and FIRSTRobotics Competition Dean’s List Award Winners are invited to Manchester for a whirlwind of events! Anika was chosen to speak at Dean Kamen’s house, with Dean, Woodie Flowers, Don Bossi, and numerous vendors and supporters of FIRST in the audience. We’re excited to share her speech, which is a story of her journey of starting out as a student with no robotics experience, to a leader of her FIRSTTech Challenge team!

It was the fall of my freshman year, 2013.

My robotics journey was supposed to last for five minutes.

It was the beginning of the year in ninth grade, and I had promised my new friend Delia that I would go with her to Room 361 to check out a robotics club. It was the end of lunch, and as a result, the end of the interest meeting the club had planned for the day. She was worried about interrupting the presentation, and I, looking for an opportunity to make a friend, had offered to go with her for moral support.

As we entered the classroom, I almost ended up being the one to chicken out, and she had to drag me inside with her. As we entered, for a brief moment, all eyes swiveled towards us. I held my breath. The seniors and leaders of the club called out to us warmly and ushered us to the front of the room, where they went over, in painstaking detail, the game challenge for the year.

I left the classroom after the bell rang with a fascination for the club and a promise to myself that I would come back. I would see just what it was that made these upperclassmen so passionate that they were willing to devote every day of their busy weeks to this pursuit.

And I did just that, although it ended up not being until much later. I got caught up in the inevitable rush that comes with joining a new school and struggling to stay on top of everything. I went to check back in with the club at the end of the year, however, sort of hanging around them without any real attachment.

A year later, I joined the team, still sort of on a whim, but adamant on keeping my promise to myself. I was accepted with no knowledge of robotics, programming, or planning- only a lot of commitment (and free time).

Let’s skip forward to the fall of 2014.

By this time, I had integrated myself to a certain extent onto the team, but not to the level I had anticipated. I have always been a shy child, and I hated to ask questions or suggest ideas. I had made a couple of casual acquaintances, however, and the projects I was involved in were interesting enough...they just weren’t at all what I had hoped for.

The team had just finished a brainstorming session for the game challenge (which was Cascade Effect). I did not chime in with any ideas, afraid that they weren’t good enough to say out loud. After the meeting disbanded I retreated to the fringes of the classroom we were using as a meeting space, took a dry erase marker, and began drawing a couple of designs for the bucket on the whiteboard. One of these designs involved a bucket with a hole at the bottom and a latch to let the whiffle balls out. It was this design that caught the eye of the mechanical team captain of my team. He came over and peppered me with questions, asking me about how I thought I could get it to work. As I stumbled over my response, I gained more confidence, telling him about how I thought the bucket could attach to the lift and how they would work together.

Thoughtful for a minute, he asked me to come with him and explain the idea to the rest of the team, which I then did. As everyone spoke excitedly about a working idea for the bucket and lift, I felt the first twinges that this small club might one day become something very important to me.

The feeling was solidified at the East Super-Regionals, where the team gathered in a small hotel room late at night, fixing the harvester of the bot and laughing about everything from the ridiculousness of our school mascot (and the fact that the costume had been around for the past 20 years, or so the legend went) to the cha-cha slide. We piled up furniture on the beds so people would have room to sit on the floor and took shifts sleeping so that no one would be completely tired. (We all ended being exhausted by the second day of competition, but it was definitely worth it).

After we didn’t advance, I was disappointed, but I knew we had two years ahead of us. As the summer went by in a flurry of outreach programs and demos all over our county, I found myself looking forward to the start of school for the first time; and not just because of the fact that I was going to be a leader on the team.

At the beginning of the summer, I had seen the emails about applications for the leadership positions come and go, but I gave no thought to applying myself. I didn’t believe I was qualified in any way.

I was encouraged, however, by a captain to apply for the position I had been eyeing- communications captain. I would handle the management, outreach, organization, and notebook for the team, something I felt capable in being able to do with my newfound confidence.

After applying and getting the position, the year went by in a haze. I began to assert myself more and more on the team as I raced to create new projects and learn. Because in addition to new mechanical and communication skills, I had also learned that shyness flies right out of the window when there’s a week left till competition and nothing is done.

As I did more for the team, I found myself liking what I did more and more. I went after opportunities with a fervor that I had never had, which surprised even me. A five minute conversation with a director at a robotics camp turned into the development of a robotics program for children of low-income families, using a 10 week NXT based program that I had not even believed myself capable of writing. I worked with a company to turn what was previously a local initiative to teach science and technology into a national project which will (crossing my fingers on this) hopefully be successful for the next few years and beyond. Our team didn’t make it past the state championship, but the journey we went on together was so, so wonderful and more importantly, so, so fun. And who knows? Maybe next year will finally be our year.

As part of FIRST, I have learned to problem solve, to come up with quick solutions without losing my cool, to lead a team, to multitask, delegate and get results. Yeah, it can be frustrating when the lift breaks down for the one hundredth time right before you’re about to go out to compete, or when someone “forgets” to write in the notebook after you’ve told them to do it a thousand times. But it happens, and FIRST has also taught me that not everything is in your control. It’s how you react to situations like that that make the bigger difference.

I’ve discovered a new passion for engineering and robotics, and for teaching these skills to a new generation. I never believed I was inclined towards the sciences and technology. But I’ve found skills I didn’t know I had and a joy in teaching robotics that I didn’t expect. There is nothing quite like watching weeks of planning all slide into place for the night of an event.  There is nothing on earth like seeing a little kid so ecstatic over the little robot she has just built that she makes a vow to become an engineer (or whatever it is that allows her to continue building these robots for the rest of her life).

Most importantly, I have gained confidence in myself and the fact that I can do whatever I set my mind to. I have come a long way from not being able to speak at meetings- now I run them.

More than anything, what I’m trying to express with this is a gratitude to FIRST for creating this organization, this wonderful, supportive community of intelligent and creative individuals. The people who join this organization and support it are truly in a class all to their own. These are the people who took a shy, awkward, little ninth grader and gave her a community to belong to, who encouraged her every single step of the way, and who always made her feel like her voice and opinion mattered and that she could do anything. This community has helped me find something I am truly passionate about, and in the process, I have made some of the best memories and learned some of the most important lessons of my life.

I cannot express enough how much I owe to this organization and how much of an impact it has made on my life. Because of FIRST, I know that I want to be part of the STEM world and work with it in a close capacity. I also know that I want to continue working with FIRSTand hopefully mentor teams of my own after I graduate. I want to pass on to a new generation the lessons, respect and kindness that my seniors have shown me, as well as a love of robotics that will stick with them for the rest of their days.  

My robotics journey was supposed to last for 5 minutes. Thus far it has been 3 wonderful years- and if I’m lucky, it will last a lifetime.

For more information on FIRST Tech Challenge Dean's List, please visit our website! 

Photo credit: Lipofsky.com