Personal Narrative: Losing A Robot

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To this day, nothing has changed me so profoundly as investing a precious Saturday to unsuccessfully test a robot. Losing the Robotics tournament that was the culmination of months of systematic building and testing devastated me. I was chosen by my peers to lead the club later on in the season and only took up more responsibility after the senior leaders did not want to come anymore, but that did not dampen the stinging feeling of failing my teammates.

I had taken over the reins as de facto leader in late November of 2015, just weeks before our first tournament and immediately sought to help us collaborate with each other better. Thus, I felt crushed when we lost that first competition. It seemed like staying after school for another three or more hours daily was a waste of my time. All that time in the cramped room, all those sketches we drew, and all those hours spent debugging the program had accomplished nothing. Or so I thought. The first question I had afterward wasn’t how we could we improve, or what we should do next time, but why were we doing this work in the first place.
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I understood that we had finals to study for and wanted my teammates to come back rejuvenated with new ideas for the semester while I did some reflecting. At first, I struggled to find the motivation to work again, but I knew I had to do it in my heart. I realized that Robotics club was more than just a club for people to come and build robots, and I couldn’t let a single failure deter my