This is the essay I submitted for the Bloomfield High School Girls FIRST Robotics Scholarship in 2017, of which I was 1 of 5 recipients. I came across this when I was looking for old content to start this blog off, and I am including the essay here, because I think it sums my FIRST experience up well.

A note to my freshman self:

Hey, little freshman,

So, you’re considering joining robotics? Great! Plan on abandoning any semblance of a social

life outside of the team, pretty much not sleeping for a solid 16 weeks, and dedicating yourself

to more 18-hour long days than you would even think possible.

The truth?

You will feel frustrated and tired and crabby and stressed and stupid and hopeless.

You will be intellectually jostled and shoved and mansplained and very behind on homework.

You will find bugs and glitches and dents and malfunctions and probably tears.

You will hate math and physics and ask what they’ve ever done for you.

You will want to throw handtools and kick computers and scream into the morass of a shop.

You will absolutely love it.

You will be intellectually challenged and pushed outside of your comfort zone.

You will learn how to fabricate and CAD and wire and how not to make pancakes.

You will figure out how to work with other humans and deadlines and other pressures.

You will evolve into a leader, and a loud one at that.

You will feel the thrill of winning a match (once, even, as 8th Alliance usurping the 1st).

You will witness the wide-eyed expression on the face of the kid that you let drive your bot.

You will encourage the underclassmen to try new things and get their hands dirty.

You will wonder how you actually even spent your time before joining.

You will represent your entire team at Worlds as a Dean’s List Finalist.

You will land a summer engineering internship in China because of your robotics training.

You will play with dry ice and helium and a bunch of other cool things.

You will get to purposefully break things.

You will find a community that supports you when you accidentally break things.

You will turn into a pro at using duct tape and zip ties, largely as a result of breaking things.

You will beam when you first see the pictures from the high-altitude balloon that you launched.

You will become excited about all that technology has to offer and ready to take on the world.

And at some point, during some blip of a tiny fraction of a second when you’re doubting

yourself, you still might want to give up.

Don’t.

Because, in the end, above all else, you will learn the most empowering of all things: how to fail.

Well, technically, you’ll learn the engineering design cycle. And then sometime around your

junior year, you’ll have this divine realization that it can actually be applied to all sorts of areas of

life. You’ll look at the laminated engineering design cycle on the wall and see a motivational

poster: you’ll recognize that failures are mere links in a scientific cycle, and that every setback is

just an option to try again, and that, in fact, the only option you have is to try again. And what’s

more inspiring than that?

So, little me, and anyone like you, I wish you all the best. I know that you just moved back to the

United States and are ready to be flawless at everything, so I want to propose a radical idea:

aim not for perfection but for resilience. I know that you are scared to join robotics, because

you’re not sure that you’ll be “good” at it. Be brave. Join robotics. Fail hard. Fail often. You will

learn so much. Resilience might not seem like a skill, but it is, so learn to do it well, because it

will serve you in the future.

Your future self,

Camber Hortop

P.S. What, did you honestly think that building robots was going to be as effortless as it is in an

Ironman montage?

P.P.S. ... because I know that you did.

Ad Astra.

Camber