Hope by Lily

Hope by Lily - October 2018 Scholarship Essay

A missed opportunity this past year has made me consider the concept of "thinking outside the box" a lot; particularly in the last two months while preparing for the coming year.
Last year, my robotics came within 1 ranking of making it to the World Championships. This was our second year in a row missing it. We worked hard, making sure that our robot was the best it could be and putting our best drivers out there to have the best mobility. We won an award at 2 out of 3 of our competitions and were finalists at one competition as well. Based on solely our statistics, we should have at least made it to the World Championships.
However, we were missing one key component: flexibility in our strategy. We were very good at what we did, but our strategy was to have laser focus on one aspect of the competition only. When we were placed on alliances, teams made up of 3 robotics teams, with teams who were not diversified, we had to work extremely hard to not only do what we do well, but also counteract the other alliance’s capabilities to do what we couldn’t by stretching ourselves thin. If our team had at least been flexible enough with our strategy to have trained for other aspects of the game or built other capabilities in preparation for non-ideal eventualities, then we may have done better. We would not even consider building other capabilities or modifying a strategy because we saw it as “a waste”. We saw it as a waste, at least, until it was all over and we missed our chance at the World Championships. Thinking outside the box meant the difference between competing at a World Level and competing at a Pacific Northwest level.
After it was all over, we debriefed the season to see where we might improve. There were two things we found we needed to improve upon for the coming season: organization and thinking outside the box. This is what inspired me to run for co-captain on the team. I wanted to be the one to make this difference and ever since I was voted into the position, thinking outside the box has been on my mind. I have researched countless workshops and potential courses to get my team ready for competition. To me, at this point, thinking outside the box means hope. Hope that all of our hard work as a team can pay off, hope I can succeed as captain, and hope that our team can inspire the next generation of STEM innovators.