Big Goals

By setting Big Goals, you write a vision for what you want to learn and how you want to grow on our team this year. Select goals that are ambitious but feasibly accomplished this school year. You'll break these down into smaller monthly goals later.

Select three Big Goals for the year. At least one must focus on developing hard skills or knowledge related to your technical subgroup. And at least one must focus on developing soft skills or interpersonal skills related to your cooperative/collaborative relationships with your teammates. Select a picture to represent each goal.

Outreach

Outreach will be one of my main focuses this year. I want to get more than 40 hours of outreach this year (double the amount required hours this year). I will achieve this goal by mentoring as many teams as possible and going to all the FTC competitions and workshops. I want to do this because I realized last year how much I liked mentoring other teams and sharing my knowledge with others.

CAD

By the end of the year, I want to be able to make an assembly of the robot's intake, complete with motion study and simulation. I believe I will be able to do this after all the CAD knowledge I'll have acquired throughout the year. I chose this as my goal because I realized CAD is something I really enjoy doing, and I want to become proficient in it.

Teamwork

Being on CAD, I will mostly be working on my own. My goal is to be able to communicate and get to know the rest of the team members. This goal will challenge me to get out of my comfort zone and talk to others, which is something I've only started doing this year. This goal is relevant to me because communication is something I've always valued in a team, and I want to be able to contribute to the team in as many ways as possible.

Year-End Reflection

For my outreach goal, I was able to get 40 hours of community service, of which 35 were dedicated to robotics. The amount of hours I’ve reached shows my dedication to this team, and how much time and effort I’ve put into it. I was able to mentor the three Masterman middle school FLL teams, which is more than I expected. It was a rewarding experience, especially because I hadn’t worked with younger kids in a long time, and it reminded me how much I enjoyed mentoring and teaching. As a tech advisor at events, I was able to help kids with the coding issues that came up. I specifically remember how there was one little kid whose team wasn’t able to make it. He didn’t know how to program his robot, so I sat with him for a few hours and we worked on his code together. I think that experience will stay with me for the rest of my life because it reminded me how I made a difference in these kids' lives. Maybe this kid would’ve gone home not wanting to be in robotics anymore, but knowing that he didn’t, has made me happy that I made outreach one of my goals this year.

My second goal was CAD. I chose this goal because CAD is one of my biggest passions, and it was very important to me to get better at it. I’ve made huge progress since the beginning of the year when I didn’t even know how to make an assembly. I believe I reached my goal because I CADed the intake for our robot this season, even though we ended up redesigning it completely. I learned a bit about motion study and was able to simulate the claw opening and closing with the gears meshing. I have the knowledge to CAD the robot’s current intake, which I wouldn’t even have known how to begin to do last year. I’m excited to learn more CAD next year, and CAD the robot’s more complex mechanisms with my acquired knowledge.

My last goal was teamwork. Before robotics, I’d usually just work on my own when I was on a team. This year I pushed myself to make new friends and work on CAD as a team. I think I’ve reached my goal because whenever there was a problem or I needed help I made sure to communicate it to my team members. Together we created a team that stuck to deadlines and solved problems together. I think with CAD, it’s more than just people who work together, we joke and laugh and talk about personal things too, and that to me makes us a team.

Overall, I’m proud of having accomplished all of my goals this year. It was hard at times, and I’ve had to cancel plans and miss events to go to robotics and work on CAD, but I think it was worth it. I’ve met a lot of new people who genuinely care, and I’ve made so many memories that I will cherish forever. I'm really excited to go back to robotics next year.

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