Home > About FIRST > Perspectives on FIRST > Angie Wang
"At the start of my freshman year, I was well aware that Clark had a robotics team, but I knew next to nothing about it until Josh, a rookie at that time, so enthusiastically spoke of it one day during (or maybe it was after) 7th period Spanish class. As someone who was attending a public high school for the first time, completely oblivious to the existence of after-school club activities and the impact they would have on college applications (word of advice - join clubs because you're truly interested in them, not because they look good on applications; enthusiasm and passion for what you do really are important in college admissions), I couldn't imagine the impact that joining Team 696 would have. I have always liked science and technology, but, as the saying goes, applying what you have learned inside a high school classroom to real-world problems (or in this case, the problem of designing a robot in 6 weeks to successfully meet the competition objectives) comes with so many benefits. After all, you won't be spending the rest of your life memorizing physics formulas or robotically reciting trigonometric identities (though I must say that having your basic trig identities memorized is extremely helpful if you plan on majoring in any kind of physical science, engineering, or math). Instead, using a sine or cosine lookup table, you might be writing some Assembly code to control a robot's drive motors; or you might be using some basic physics formula to approximate the motion of a quantum particle (okay, so it's not quite that simple). FIRST gives you this opportunity. It also teaches you the very essentials of systems engineering; it teaches you how to be a pragmatic problem solver and a team player.
"Balancing your typical high school workload, what with AP classes and other extracurriculars, with the countless weekday and weekend hours on the robotics team was no easy task. I'm sure all of us had some overwhelming feeling of frustration at some point during our time on the team. Sometimes, that affected our teamwork. Sure, it was no cup of tea to have to wait until the week before ship to be given some area on the robot to mount the electronics, but I realized in retrospect that a lot of the difficult situations all of us managed to overcome mimicked situations people encounter in their respective companies or agencies every day. It was also because we were able to overcome these challenges that completing the robot (you know that feeling when you weigh the robot for the last time before ship and it's actually under the weight limit) felt truly rewarding. I definitely think that winning the 2007 San Diego Regionals was one of the most memorable moments of the 4 years I spent in high school.
"During the build season, you develop an incredibly close bond with everyone on the team. I think it's an honor to have had such a wonderful opportunity to interact with such brilliant people. The experience was definitely fun, and I'm glad I was able to make so many lasting friends.
"As for me personally? Well, I'm currently dabbling with microprocessors and various hardware/software programming languages both inside and outside of school. Yes, I'm an electrical engineering major. Guess why. :D"