Senior captain Clara Slade remembers walking into her first Robotics meeting, after a friend had convinced her to join. She didn’t know what to expect, and never anticipated it would end up being one of her favorite extracurriculars.

“I just thought it was for nerds, but then I came to a couple meetings and it’s such a great program and I learned so much,” Slade said. “I’m getting my foot in the door of all these places.”

Slade said she enjoys the competitions and educational aspects of robotics the most.

“Competition is really fun because you meet a lot of professors from the University of Minnesota,” she said, “They really try and go in-depth about how this applies to college majors and careers, so it’s really cool to look into that.”

Slade said, for example, she had no interest in engineering type fields until last year when she talked to a professor at a competition about it.

“I have always been interested in the medical field, but I would definitely pursue now more the engineering side of medicine, like biomedical engineering.” Slade said.

As a captain, Slade said she has more responsibility during competitions. She said she’s in charge of communications, and when it’s not competition season, she works on other challenges, like teaching new members, building the website and fundraising.

“We’re having a bit of a challenge with fundraising and finding more mentors,” Slade said. “We’re looking for community members that might have skills in the STEM field that are willing to come and help us, whether it’s helping us with our CAD, or helping us with building our website.”

Despite the challenges she might face, Slade said she loves being on the team. One of her favorite memories happened last year, on the last night to work on their robot.

“Last year, it was the night we had to seal up our robot to ship off to the competition, because you’re not allowed to touch it after a certain point. We  stayed until almost midnight and we’d ordered pizza and we were all just eating pizza and building our robot,” Slade said. “It was super late at night, the janitors kept on coming and telling us we needed to leave. It was just a fun night.”

Slade said she hopes to continue learning and improving this year. She said her personal goals include getting better at talking to the prestigious people she might meet at competitions.

“I would really like to see myself develop my skills talking to big important people,” Slade said. “I really want to get more comfortable with that because I know it will help me in the long run.”