So we're halfway through the build season, and I'm halfway through my senior year. The first few days of the school year don't seem that far behind, and if I think about it, neither were my first few days on the team.

My four years of high school have been pretty different from each other, and I usually like to think of the build season as a sort of checkpoint I pass every year. Around this time freshman year, I was almost humorously naive as to what I was getting myself into. Then I took on more responsibility sophomore year and spent build season feeling very overwhelmed. This time last year I was a worn-out engineer. And now I'm a worn-out marketer :D

It's also an interesting period during my high school career. I took my last test on Tuesday, and applied to my last college Thursday night. So now what? I still have classes, though I expect I'll be focusing much more on sunny afternoons at the park than on the integrals on the blackboard. The same goes for robotics to some extent. After three years of building robots, watching them compete, and then spending subsequent weeks preoccupied with heartbreaking loses, I have to wonder if I'm really as excited about Breakaway as I was for Lunacy, Overdrive, and Rack n' Roll.

But then I'm reminded of why I keep coming back to the lab for hours every night, year after year, when most of my peers are hanging out or, even better, sleeping. Around 8pm tonight, I walked into the lab and saw a new member struggling to cut through a foot-thick piece of wood using a saw. After face-palming loudly, I told him to stop as I went into the tool cabinet and grabbed a Sawz-all (reciprocating saw, if you're fancy). And then I showed the kid how to use it. Regardless of whether you're a engineer, marketer, programmer, what have you, it's easy to recognize the Sawz-all as one of the greatest and scariest tools in a machine shop. I had a fun time using it, and when I saw how impressed the kid was and how eager he was to use it for the next cut, I remembered why I always come back to the team. I don't really care about what the challenge is anymore, or how many points the top team scores at competition. But I do like engineering, and I love having the opportunity to show people why engineering is so great (which is what the team is perfect for).

Anyway, even if the term is over, I still have some work to get to. I'm excited to see if any of my footage will make it into next week's episode of The Lab, and I also have a couple of environmental initiatives to work on...

-Betsy