I was first introduced to the world of robotics when I was 8. It started with a week-long robotics summer camp at the Rochester Museum & Science Center. There I had my first taste of robotics in the form of Lego’s, cause we all gotta start somewhere right?
Robotics continued to be a part of my life even after I moved to the Midwest, but I faced a hard break when COVID-19 hit, and we were new to town and had no connections. How was I to pursue an activity I had missed? Dare I say I regret not putting more effort into finding something for myself? But I understand that I was young and didn't have much say in what I did during those two years.
Enter high school and I was introduced to the wonderful world of FIRST.
I joined my school's FIRST Robotics Competition team and found myself back where I had started, back to creating things. While I didn't have an active role in actually creating the robot, I helped in other ways. To those who know how FRC works, it has many subsections and subteams, and I found myself under field elements. I helped construct the field, create our robot's bumpers in freshman year, and helped with some game strategy. That year was my first brush back into the world of robots, and I dare say it was a year well done.
The following year, I joined a local FIRST Tech Challenge team, which was great, too. It was a smaller community of people with whom I became close and am still friends. FTC allowed me to be more hands-on in all aspects of FIRST, from building the robot to reaching out to my community. FTC let me experience it all on a closer basis.
The biggest perk to my FTC team was that it was an all-girls team. Now, no offense to the guys, but being in an all-girls team made it easier to be heard and simply be. We were a small group that could freely express our thoughts and ideas, and it was a really nice community to be with.
It also opened me up to realizing and understanding a whole lot more about the positions women have in the STEM field. I remember back to my very first summer camp; there was a pretty even split between genders, and we were all the same, just kids wanting to learn more. But now? As I grow older, I see fewer and fewer girls continuing in the STEM/robotics field. During my freshman year in FRC, only about 4 to 5 girls actually participated in the STEM side of FRC; the other girls took part in the business side.
This is truly a worrying fact because this means that at some time between then and now, girls started losing that spark/interest in STEM and robotics.
The only thing that we can really do to help this moving forward is to make STEM seem more of a safe space for everyone, which means having more girls partake in STEM-related activities and careers. The biggest piece of advice that I can give is to stick with it. Don't let anyone else tell you that you can't do something or be something, and stick with your passions until the end.
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