Alumnus of FIRST Tech Challenge

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I had been in a First Tech Challenge team (team number 8581) for three years of high school before I graduated. I came up with the new name of my team in the start of my junior year of high school: Ædificatores, Latin for "builders" or "constructors". Early on, we had a lot of issues with other people mispronouncing the name.

In my first year of FTC (my sophomore year of high school), 8581 didn't do so well, which was before we got the fancy Latin name. In my second year (junior year of high school), we made it all the way to the Super-Regionals level. (Super-Regionals is the USA equivalent of nationals; it splits the US into several super-regions because it's such a big country)

Furthermore, one of the first awards that my team ever got was the Control Award for good programming; this was when I was the only programmer on the team, so it was a pretty big ego-boost at the time. The veterans of 8581, whom I've worked with before my graduation from high school, often credit me for our success in the 2016-2017 season, since our robot's main strength was its good performance in the autonomous phase. Despite that, I will maintain that my teammates who built the robot and performed outreach were even more vital than I was to our team's success.

We also made it to Super-Regionals in my senior year, when I was no longer the only programmer on the team, and was involved in coaching new members of the team to program. Now, I think they're doing a lot better then I ever did, especially in terms of code style and reducing technical debt, which is good for the team.