Moving to Hawaii during my freshman year of high school was difficult for me. Being naturally introverted, I often found ways to be by myself. I decided to challenge this by joining the robotics team, the Sharkbots. Initially, I studied coding on my own, however, I felt like an outsider. This all changed when I decided to go on what was my first robotics trip to Honolulu. I shared a room with a teammate, actually worked with people during the competition, and shared a lot with the community about what we were doing. From that point forward, I started to feel like I was a part of something. Since then I’ve worked with various sized groups, gotten better at public speaking, and taught younger students what I learned. In what seems like a short period of time, I went from being an introverted girl learning about robotics to being an Overlord. When I accepted the position as Overlord, I didn’t know what it meant to lead others, but I jumped in with both feet. I was working with multiple groups of students on building the chassis, actuator, circuit board, and writing code for our robot. We decided to name our robot Saturn, I made deadlines and facilitated meetings every week to show Saturn’s progress, and helped team members stay on the same page. We entered Saturn into the regional FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) in Australia. I began to feel more confident in being a leader and working with others. When part of our robot failed during a match, a teammate gave ideas on how to fix it. I took his ideas and contemplated if we had the time and materials, then put a plan together. The two of us were paired together because of his out-of-the-box thinking and my ability to determine if it was a plausible plan. We were finalists and qualified to compete in the FRC World Championships in Houston, Texas. Before going home we broke down our robot Saturn for travel, uncertain if we were going to be able to make it to the world championships. We exhausted our entire budget for the regional competition, and never in our high school history had a robotics team made it to the world championships. In the 4 weeks between getting home from regionals and the world championships, we fundraised enough money to go! When competing in the regional competition I learned how to get better organized and we worked better as a team. During my time in Houston, I lived and competed with my team and collaborated with other teams from around the world. Being a small team from Hawaii, we were a student-driven team and worked hard to make great accomplishments despite our limitations. In the world competition, we ranked high in the preliminaries, enabling us to become alliance captain in the playoffs. During my university search and applications, I have reflected on my high school experience and found satisfaction and pride in my progress. I pursued my interest in programming by initiating a study in Python, created and programmed sensors to collaborate with actuators, learned soldering and wiring, and helped build the circuit board for my team’s robots. I joined a project focused on building an electric car, and also joined a welding project, researching welding equipment and gaining experience at a welding expo. Facing the difficulty of moving from California to Hawaii in the middle of my freshman year challenged and changed me. Before robotics, I did not know much about what I wanted to do in college. After exploring engineering, I have found my passion.

My mom was not able to finish college because her mom wouldn't pay for it. My education has always been her number one priority. She has moved me and my sister to different states if it meant we would have a better environment for learning. Not many people in my family have been to college, because of that the whole process is new to us. My mom was there every step of the way from review my essays to helping me find schools. Now that I've picked to go to Prairie View A&M she will pay for me to go to college any way she can. Since she has done so much for me I just want to make one thing easier on her. I will do work-study and revive as many scholarships as I can to help out.