Experience·Fall 2021 – Spring 2025·Hopewell Junction, NY
Jaybots FTC Robotics Team @ John Jay High School
CAD Lead & Vice President
Our high school robotics team, Jaybots, competed in the FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) and advanced multiple times to the state championship as well as to the World Championship in 2025. As CAD Lead I designed each season's robot end-to-end, and as VP I managed the team and mentored younger members.
OnShape · 3D Printing · FTC · Team Leadership · Mentoring
Jaybots (FTC #16700) is John Jay High School's competitive robotics team participating in FIRST Tech Challenge — an international robotics competition where student teams design, build, and program robots to complete complex game challenges each season. I joined the team in my freshman year with no prior engineering experience, and over four years grew from a curious newcomer into the team's CAD Lead and Vice President. The team advanced to the New York State Championship multiple times and earned a spot at the FTC World Championship in 2025.
As CAD Lead, I was responsible for translating each year's game challenge into a functional robot design using OnShape. The design process began with strategic analysis of the game manual — identifying which tasks were highest value and which mechanisms were feasible within our build capabilities. From there I produced full robot assemblies including drivetrains, scoring mechanisms, and custom 3D-printed components. Close collaboration with the build team was essential: designs that looked elegant in CAD sometimes required significant iteration once fabrication began.
Taking on the VP role added a management and mentorship dimension to my experience. I coordinated team meetings, managed deadlines around competition season, ran CAD workshops for underclassmen, and helped newer members develop the skills to eventually own their own subsystems. Watching students I taught go on to lead the team themselves was one of the most rewarding parts of my high school engineering experience.