Dean's List Highlight: Colleen Johnson

2016 Dean’s List Winner, Colleen Johnson explainshow the skills she has learned participating in FIRST programs has changed her perception of herself, what she can accomplish, and her goals for the future.

FIRST has changed my life. You hear that sentence over and over again, tens, or even hundreds of times, at different FIRST events, but let’s take a moment to really step back and think about what those words mean.  FIRST has taught me so many different valuable lessons, and helped me identify such a wide variety of passions, that I honestly don't know where I would be without it.

Now, before we go any further, there’s something you should know. I love to create videos.  Training videos, advertisements, audition tapes, dumb little videos with my friends, whatever.  And I’ll talk about how FIRST helped me discover that a bit later, but for right now I want you to imagine this.  A young girl sits in the middle of the Smart Move FIRSTLEGO League course in fuzzy pink footy pajamas holding a robot.  She looks a startling amount like I did 7 years ago.  She also looks exhausted, stressed, and determined. 

This is just one image from the video of my life. It is set about a week before my first ever robotics tournament. Let’s press play and see what happens. The girl is in her favorite pajamas, sitting in the middle of the LEGO course holding a malfunctioning robot, and it’s almost 1 A.M.  She and her sister are working on a programming problem.  They’re trying to figure out how the robot can find its position on the course, despite having just gone over the dynamometer, a rolling LEGO contraption that is, in her mind, designed specifically to make robots lose their place.  They’ve been working on different variations of this problem for a week or so, and at this point she wants nothing more than for the robot to magically start working. Or, failing that, to just be able to go to bed.  But they push through, and eventually they get it to work. 

Fast forward a week, December 2009. After a rough start to the tournament, the robot has finally started working properly, and it scores 360 points on its second run. Later, the girl will find out that this is the highest score an Alaska team has ever gotten, but right now she’s too busy celebrating the fact that her team will be moving on to the World tournament.  

Rewind to the beginning of the season. She starts FIRST LEGO League just before she turns eleven.  Her parents have coached since she was a baby, and she’s grown up surrounded by different teams and their robots.  She’s incredibly excited to be a part of a team of her own, and to get to work on robots with her friends.  

She’s built robots with her family before, but nothing as complicated as the robots she’s seen past team members build, and she’s excited to finally get to build complicated robots, too.  Her team starts off with a base robot that she designs, and then they add different “attachments” to complete the missions across the course.  She realizes that most of the robot’s time is spent in base, being configured, instead of out on the field and scoring points.  Because of this, she adds LEGO magnets to the base robot and the attachments, so that they can be dropped into place.  She’s incredibly proud of herself, and she’s starting to come up with innovative solutions to problems.  This will help her throughout her entire time in FIRST. 

Fast forward again, April 2010. It’s less than 24 hours after the end of the 2010 World Championship, and the girl is on a plane headed to Bethel, a remote Alaskan village of less than 3000 people.  Her father has been asked to be the Field Tech Advisor for a tournament there.  She’d really rather just be going home.  Her plane lands, and they go straight from the airport to the school where the tournament is being held. Her father gets whisked away to help a team with their robot, and she starts to look around the room.  It’s full of robots much bigger than the ones she builds, and the scary teenagers who’ve built them.  But she starts to walk around and take a closer look at the robots, and she starts to recognize some things here and there.  That’s a bell crank, just like the one she used on her robot this season. And these robots are all powered by NXTs, just like the robots she has built.  Maybe, she thinks, maybe this isn’t so scary after all.  Maybe I could do this one day.

Fast forward to December 2014. The girl stands in the Fairbanks airport with a FIRSTTech Challenge team shirt on and a bag full of wiring supplies.  She’s four years older than she was the last time she made this trip, and she’s incredibly nervous because she’s traveling without her parents for the first time.  She’s headed to Bethel to help teams wire their robots, and to FTA like her father did during her first trip there. 

This time it will just be her and her sister.  She helps teams wire their robots, and then when that’s done her sister helps teams program them. When things inevitably break, as robots do, they help teams fix them.  It’s incredibly rewarding to be able to help other teams, and to pass on some of the knowledge that she’s learned in FIRST Tech challenge. 

Rewind to February, 2012. The girl is standing at the front of a gymnasium.  Her hands are shaking, and she wonders if the teams in the stands can tell.  She thought FIRST LEGO League would have prepared her for the stress of this competition.  She was wrong.  Someone from another team steps forward and invites her team to be their alliance partner.  She hides her shaking hands behind her back, steps forward, and says the words.  “FTC team number 3595, Schrödinger’s Hat, graciously accepts.”  She’s starting to get more confident. Her time presenting to the project judges in FIRST LEGO League has helped build her confidence, and over the next several years she will grow to love speaking in front of a crowd.  

Her first FIRST Tech Challenge tournament is an amazing learning experience.  It gets off to a rough start, but by the third match of the day her team has everything working, and they are able to routinely score, raising crates of racquetballs to almost nine feet high.  She’s never seen so many robots in one room before.  People take an interest in the mechanisms she’s built, and she spends all of her time between matches either explaining the robot to different people, or talking to other teams about their robots.  

She learns almost as much in one day of competition as she did the entire rest of the season.  Her alliance loses in the division finals, and her season ends there, but she heads home buzzing with ideas for next year.

Fast forward to January 2013. The girl sits on the floor of the “robot room” with her team.  Her father is holding an iPhone, filming them, as they awkwardly stutter through answers to the question “what I’ll carry with me from FIRST,” while trying not to look directly at the camera.  She has volunteered to make a Promote Video for the team because she is the only one who has any editing software, and now she’s wondering if she regrets volunteering for this.  One of her teammates forgets what he was trying to say, looks directly into the camera, and starts laughing.  She doesn't know it yet, but she will spend a long time editing out moments like this.   

Fast forward about a week. She’s just finished making her first ever Promote video. She had absolutely no idea what she was doing, but she dove in, because that’s what you do in FIRST.  And after around a week of weeding through horrible techno public domain music, and going a little bit crazy with the ready-made title screens in iMovie, she’s done. And she’s incredibly proud of herself. 

She doesn’t know it yet, but she’s just started herself down a very important road.  Several years from now she won’t be able to watch that first Promote video without wanting to scour every trace of it from the face of the earth, but she had to start somewhere.  And that summer she dives into the world of video production headfirst.  She makes lists of public domain music she likes, and she starts watching ads to see what makes them successful.  By the time the new video prompt comes out, she has so many different ideas she almost doesn't know where to start.  The next year her video will win at the World Championship.  The year after that, her video will be a finalist, and Woodie Flowers will watch it and talk to her for some time about college and following her passions.  He requests the link to the video, and she finds out some months later that the video ended up on MIT’s mailing list.  Several years later, she’ll be seriously considering majoring in Media and Marketing, all because of that first video. 

Fast forward to May 2013. The girl sits with her sister on a couch in a living room.  Her parents come home from a meeting with the other team parents. They sit down, and tell her something huge.  It changes her life.  She sits, shocked for a moment, and then starts crying happy tears.  She thought that her second season was over.  Now, her team will be going to the Asia Pacific Invitational, in Sydney Australia.   

Fast forward to July 2013. It's the last day of the Asia Pacific Invitational in Sydney, Australia.  Her team has just won third-place Inspire, and they’re standing and having their picture taken with Monkey Madness, the second-place team, and Beta, the team who won first place Inspire, not only at the API, but also at the World Championship a few months prior.  To even be in the same picture as them is truly an honor. 

They've achieved what every single team dreams of.  After the group picture is done, one of Beta’s team members walks over and congratulates her team.  She doesn't know it yet, but several years later he will be mentoring her team. 

Fast forward to summer 2015. The girl’s team has won the Inspire Award – the highest honor in FIRST Tech Challenge again next year -- at the World Championship.  She wishes she could pause here, and live in this moment for a little longer. It’s been several months, and sometimes she still wakes up in the middle of the night and freaks out a little bit that that really did happen.  She still doesn't entirely believe it.  Right now she’s sitting with her family in their living room.  They’re talking, and she’s trying to figure out if she should do FIRSTTech Challenge again next year.  After all, they've won the highest honor possible.  What’s the point of continuing from that? 

She and her sister decide that yes, they will continue to compete, and that during the next season they will focus equal parts on competing as a team, and paying it forward. They’ve learned so much in these years in FIRST, and they want to be able to pass that knowledge on and help other teams in the way that they’ve been helped in the past. 

Fast forward for the last time, July 2016. She’s about to start her senior year, and with it, her last year on a FIRST team, and that's incredibly bittersweet.  Sometimes she wishes that she could rewind, and relive these memories before she’s done with the program.  But she’ll never truly be done with FIRST.  The lessons she’s learned have shaped the person that she’s growing up to be, and it’s incredibly important for her to pass them on.  Once she graduates, she wants to continue to help.  She wants to mentor her old team, help new teams get started, keep working on resources for FIRST, and help in any way that she can.  FIRSThas helped her to discover her passions, and helped her cultivate many different important skills.  She’s received amazing mentorships from all over the world, and now it’s her job to help pay it forward.