I started exploring the world of STEM when I went to a LEGO camp in my town, but I was first introduced to software when I attended a Scratch camp at my YMCA. I spent many years making platformers, AMVs, math tools, and…recreating flash games? All of this, though, inspired me to make games more seriously, so I took some courses on video game development, where I learned C++ and Java. At the same time, a friend of mine and I were learning Python just for fun (though our code wasn’t the best quality). This exposure taught me just how much more there was to coding, and I was completely hooked. But, after COVID, I stopped being as interested in video game development (obviously, in 6th grade, I’d matured), and since I was good at math, I thought I’d have fun doing engineering. So, I took the Engineering class at my middle school in 7th grade, and I loved the class and my teacher, Mrs. Longnecker. I was especially fascinated with the LEGO EV3’s we used to complete these Mars missions on a huge table (full circle moment!). But when I wanted to continue doing engineering through robotics, my school didn’t offer any more classes and finding a team was quite difficult. It wasn’t until 2024 that I finally found a FIRST Robotics team that would take me in. Initially, I wanted to do CAD, but my background in software helped me fill a niche that was present in the team, so I stuck with it. I continued working on design, but I fell in love again with software, with an insatiable hunger to make sure my code worked on the robot as much as possible. That drive helped me learn so much that summer, and made me capable to lead my team’s software efforts in 2025.