Yes, I’m breaking my rules from post #1, and yes, this will be a highly personal, highly introspective story with some hopeful generalizations about my broader motivations in life, in the hopes that I can both find people to connect to and a broader meaning to the rest of my life.

I was writing another blog post on capitalism (which is nearing its completion - it’s my longest post yet but has a lot of formalizations to go) and I wanted to convey something that means a lot to me in recent times and what I have been reflecting on as far as what it means with regards to the rest of my life. It’s about success, the most rewarding part of my high school journey, and why I am currently frightened.

I’m not sure what I hope to convey through this story, but it is a personally satisfying one to tell. The Metal Crusaders, my high school robotics team, is my life story’s essence at its most fundamental core, and reflects who I am deeper than many other parts of my life.

Everyone in the world should get a standing ovation at least once in their life because we all overcometh the world. — Auggie, from “Wonder” by R. J. Palacio, American author

background#

This story is about robotics, and it begins in my freshman year. I was part of a robotics team in my freshman year called the Techno Titans, and they were a well-known premier robotics team within my state. Though my season with them was lackluster, there were a couple important events which I’ll summarize below.

A head mentor placed their trust and faith in me to lead an award presentation which we won at our first qualifier event. It was the first time someone had believed in me that much. I learned through this that not only did I enjoy winning, but that I could distinguish the kind of winning where it not only felt good to be a part of a thing, but to contribute to success greater than oneself.
I learned why role models were so significant: I looked up to many upperclassmen in my senior year as sources of entertainment, skill, and leadership. They enabled me to come out of my circle and be the social person I am now, to put myself forward.
I learned that progress and spirit could be reliable substitutes to the thrill of performance. This was reinforced by the fact that our robotics team, of over 100 people, was coming off the biggest spirit high possible. Our upperclassmen took it to heart to yell at the top of their lungs to reinforce our driveteam at every single interval, and my teammates and I quickly followed suit, losing ourself in the process of what it meant to be a part of a team.
In a similar vein to the previous statement, robotics became synonymous with community. After having moved states and entering high school without any friends, robotics was my salvation. It was a source of belonging and comfort for me in a rapidly changing time, and I used the lessons of selflessness I derived from the above bullet points to dictate my mission was to spread this belonging to others.
This isn’t necessarily as symbolic as the other points, but I got to be an extra in a movie! Our team was nominated to help film a robotics subplot in a movie about football (don’t ask), and after applying, I was selected to be in the movie. It was one of the most powerful experience I’ve been in, and simply existing alongside people who I knew loved robotics as much as I did was surreal. I’ve never had so much fun pretending to screw a bolt into the robot for three hours straight.

We named the robot this year Kaizen, which is Japanese for “continuous progress,” a philosophy I took to heart. I spent the offseason pouring my heart and soul into getting better and better, both technically and otherwise, soaking up any extra knowledge I could.

I reference my background here because I find it integral to my motivations in my first year with the Metal Crusaders and a great way to frame the broader story. This precursor to my years taught me so many valued lessons about success and greatness.

year 1: chasing glory#

Coming out of my freshman year, I was thrilled for all the changes I was excited to implement to my robotics team. And then, quite promptly and without warning, I was told I’d have to move to a new high school because of redistricting issues, and leave my old team and community behind. I was furious. Beyond the insecurity of having to complete the four year high school journey in three years, there was a sinking feeling that I didn’t have enough passion or expertise to carry forth the robotics journey I was excited to live.

That sinking feeling only intensified through my method of processing my first year with the Metal Crusaders. When I joined, there were only two others and our head mentor, and our team was on the verge of collapse. I knew nothing - at the time I was nothing - and yet, I persisted, learning everything I could from our head mentor robotics-related and then everything I could from the internet programming-related. I was fueled by a fire against fate itself, so angry about the fact that I had these circumstances randomly pushed onto me that I could barely comprehend the joys I once observed as a part of robotics.

I pushed myself. In every single kid who joined, I saw some variant of the effort I displayed, and I took great care to make sure we’d all reap the rewards of our hard work. But for some reason, people just couldn’t seem to care as much as I did. Our team was so poor, in both resources and intelligence, and there was no dream to sell. We hadn’t gone to the World Championships (an essential dream for any robotics team) since 2017, and we started the year with $0 in our bank account and worked out of a closet. But regardless of every negative cirumstance, I pushed myself, and my friends, to deliver.

Our first robot, Lancelot, was a mess. Electrical done on the first day of competition, a claw that was unnecessary overweight, a tank drive that almost collapsed. We regressed into a defensive bot that pushed the game elements for most of the season qualifiers, and by some miracle, we made it to the state championships. We had a new mentor, Zac, who was a prior robotics student in high school, but he was also learning the ropes. So amidst all the crises, our team was shocked to learn we qualified at 49th place of 49 teams, and pushed all the way to 42nd place. We COULD NOT have done any worse. It was the first time I had never played in the playoffs of a competition I was in. But by god, we made it, and though I didn’t know at the time, that was the most important part of our year.

One final thing - this year, the mentor who had believed in me in my freshman year, Ms. Theresa, passed away due to cancer. It hurt so badly to not be with the team I had forged my strongest memories with, and grieve in solitude.

year 2: glory#

So, in the aftermath of year 1, I was emotionally and physically exhausted, I had many injuries across a spread of spectrums, and I was ready to give up in robotics. Indeed, the dissonance of my team celebrating making it to state while I lamented our clearly obvious shortcomings was heartbreaking. Everyone was celebrating, feeding on the energy to push forward, while for the longest time I struggled to watch my old team make it to the world championships with the best robot they had created in the longest time. This dissonance spurred one change in my head: I had to work harder, clearly, to offset the fact that we were an up and coming team (or at least, that was what I told myself).

But soon, my team’s enthusiasm infected me. I learned to see the value behind our progress. Our team almost didn’t exist when I joined - the fact that we made it to the state champs was change enough, and I didn’t take pride in our performance, but our progress gave me the conviction to continue. I remembered that freshman year robot, “Kaizen”, and took those lessons to heart, using our team’s enthusiasm as a vehicle to facilitate our learning and progress.

However, that year, I also started to think about what happened after me. The two people who were already there when I started, who were now my closest friends, were seniors graduating that year. And no one could match the mechanical skill of Luis and Jacky. We felt such great conviction to shake the earth with our robot, and I realized I needed to push that mission behind our team as well. So I began to forge community behind the team. Robotics was my first family at school, and I made sure everyone felt included, felt like they belonged to something greater than themselves. I shifted my goal, no longer to go to worlds, but simply to just outperform our progress from last year, and develop more students to supplant the two of us.

The combination of all of those things spun our team into overdrive. Not only did our team’s size grow enormously, but we also greatly improved our outreach, fundraising over $25k and spreading our elementary-school outreach to 5 different schools. Our little world had grown into a successful bubble that cultivated education at all levels, and that filled me with so much pride.

And our robot game was so much higher-level compared to last year, just by proxy of this restructuring. We upgraded many mechanisms, learned to navigate autonomous play significantly better, and I grew to better distribute leadership such that we could all develop our priorities. We played well in our two qualifiers, and this year, we so comfortably qualified for the State championships. We didn’t make it to the playoffs again - another pang to my heart - but all of our failures paled when I was called down to be the recipient of the Dean’s List Finalist Award. This award is given to two or three students within a region for their continued dedication to FIRST, their goal to pour into their community, and rise beyond their circumstances and soar to new heights. Only 170 students from year to year win this award, and for some reason, the sole winner for all of Georgia that year was me. I never imagined that I would be the recipient of this award, and to this day, I don’t know why I won it: we had people in our state who were impacting broader regions of the state and getting to the world championships every single year, whereas I was just trying to make the little corner I was from a better place. But more than anything, I took winning this award as a commitment, that my restructuring in priorities was correct. My positive view of our team and my goal to not just develop the materialistic success of our team had led us to intense progress. And as a result of this award, I got to live and breathe the robotics world championships, a surreal experience that will live with me forever.

This year was not without its challenges. I suffered greatly mentally, thinking about the mentor who believed in me and the change that spurred in my life. I wanted to celebrate her successes, and though I knew she was watching, it hurt to be living that life without her. Our team wasn’t there with me: it was up to me to carry back the enthusiasm and joy this time. And I knew my two best friends were leaving, off to certainly better and more technically fulfilling places, but I’d be alone next year on some level.

I named this chapter glory because that’s what it felt like. It felt like after a couple redefinitions, I not only sought out the glory I was looking for, but I surpassed it. The broader robotics district knew who I was and recognized the lengths I had gone to in order to achieve my team’s newfound performance - our best season since 2019.

year 3: legacy#

Conversely to year 2, in my final year, my senior year, I was coming off the greatest high of my life. Personally, I had been awarded the highest individual honor I could have been awarded - it was like shaking the GAFIRST CEO’s hand after she had told me I had done a good job. And it was the ultimate dedication to every ounce of work I had put out thus far. I was thrilled by the faith that the broader FIRST program had put in me, and determined to push forward.

And yet, there was that lingering feeling brought by the mission I had set out to accomplish. Despite my best efforts, with the two most talented robotics engineers I had worked with thus far, we didn’t make it to worlds. But I knew that I had gotten better. I had to choose during my senior year, whether I was going to prioritize glory or legacy.

This time, I chose legacy. My story was about to end, and my life’s goal was about to begin. I never liked robotics; in fact, I only ever technically enjoyed the problem-solving aspect of it. However, I enjoyed that feeling of teaching and mentoring and community, and that was what carried my senior year. I spent so much time teaching everything, not just programming, which was my specialty, and worked hard to ensure that the members of our team felt great personal commitment to contribute. I had always known that robotics was not a stereotypical extracurricular. I put in 30 hours a week, outside of high school, to build robots and teach robots and live and breathe robots, and that philosophy had to be imparted in someone before I left.

Our qualifiers bolstered my faith: for the first time, our team felt so polished in comparison to every other year prior. We’d hit the button, and the robot would do all the things flawlessly. I took great pride in watching a lot of seniors who wanted this season to end with a bang put out the energy necessary to cultivate the bang. Our two qualifiers were phenomenal: we placed crucically in the first qualifier, and delivered impeccable autonomous upgrades during the second performance, leading us to win the Autonomous Award for the first time in the team’s history. That award was extremely personal for me - after sidelining technical performance for so long, I was grateful to see there was a part of me who could still deliver it in crunch-time.

But at this cusp of our performance, I realized I couldn’t make it to our State Championships because the date conflicted with a mandatory scholarship event. I couldn’t be there for my team earlier than I had anticipated. And they did extremely poorly without me: things broke, drivers crashed, and our robot had a plethora of consistency issues. In that moment, I got scared for the progress I had pushed for. Would it have been the same without me?

aftermath#

Since coming to college, I’ve avoided talking about my robotics experience to anyone but close friends who understood what it was to me. Because on paper, I regarded it as my hardest failure. I couldn’t possibly justify my three years if at the only competition I was gone, our team did so poorly despite having what was objectively the greatest robot in team history.

But this past weekend, my opinions shifted in the complete opposite direction. This past weekend, my team participated in GRITS 2025, an offseason competition for new members to receive training with old robots. And not only did our team place 7th individually, but we captained the 5th place alliance, did phenomenally in the playoffs, and had a consistent robot game from beginning to end. Everything was perfect - by some miracle (most definitely thanks to our now prominent mentorship from Zac), they delivered greatness. They made me prouder than I ever have been, and I realized amidst silent tears at the venue that they would be ok. I had succeeded. The Metal Crusaders would live on.

I titled this blog post “proof of life” because it is a “proof” in the sense that it is a line of justification for my life’s existence: I am devoted to the continual pursuit of progress, and I derive pleasure from the learning, failing, and trying again.

But this piece is also a proof in that it is evidence to myself that there is life behind what I wanted to take away from this Earth. I always reference that my biggest goal in this life is to discover something so groundbreaking that it changes the field forever. However, this past weekend, seeing my team lay it all on the field and achieve great success in my absence, carrying forward my mission in so many ways - it felt good. And to me, that is the essence of life itself, a melting pot of hope and grief and joy and sadness and cathartic investment into the work one does.

This weekend reminded me that success may not happen in my tenure of the work, and although it initially scared me that the idea of success was so integral to my fulfillment, I think that as long as I remember the previous success, I’ll be strong enough to complete the current one. My life’s goals are still the same - groundbreaking discovery - but now I will remember the selflessness that comes with such groundbreaking. I will endure the pain of progress. And I will always remember my robotics journey for teaching me all of this.

Thank you, Metal Crusaders - I’ll be back soon. - Karthik

And as a bonus, the below link is our unsung victory, where for the first time, we stand toe to toe with some of the best teams in the district (and my former team!). We play our heart out, succeed and perform great against the odds that have compounded against us in the past three years. For the first time in a while, I can say something I struggled to say for four years. I’m proud of us. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSiabRakOzc