When I joined FIRST with my friends, I wasn't dreaming of engineering. I just wanted to have fun. As a result, the creative engineering skills I accumulated over years of building and rebuilding robots for FIRST programs helped me win the Intel Science Award for my medical devices. But FIRST programs taught me more than just technical skills. They taught all of us perseverance. Our team’s early robot was a miserable failure. But we kept at it and eventually won awards at Championship, and I even got invited to the White House Science Fair. We learned how to deal with failure and improve ourselves, all while having fun.