Inspiration at World Championships

This past week, I had the amazing opportunity to attend FIRST Robotics Competition's World Championships with my robotics team. For some, this was a chance to observe the best high school-made robots in the world. For all, it was a time to learn and experience all that FIRST had to offer. For me, it was the experience I had been dreaming of to bond with my fellow robotics team.

The things we do at robotics are not simple. In 6 weeks, we are expected to build a fully functional robot for a specific task. But in addition to the mechanical aspect of the team, we have to maintain a group that takes a lot of planning to run. My closest friends on the team are probably those I've worked with the most: the marketing team. Together, we help manage--keeping us hyped and ready for competitions while making us look like a cohesive team.

Like any other sport or extracurricular, friendships are forged through the experiences with each other. The more time you spend with these people, the more you come to enjoy their presence. I realized this early in competition season last year. While at a regional competition my freshman year, I felt a bit of what the seniors felt in their four years together--utter adoration for each other and the program.

Being at worlds gave me a similar, but more powerful, feeling. The juniors and seniors above me and freshman below me have always been amazing friends. But until our time together this past week, I had not truly observed the familial bond that's been keeping me a part of FIRST robotics.

I am not a technical person. I've learned many things in my time on the robotics team, and I hope to learn many more throughout the rest of high school. But being on the team is an opportunity for me to work in business type relations with people to manage the team. I can respect how everyone has found his or her niche on the team while never excluding others. Hopefully, as my class gets older, the bonds between the students grow deeper and even more loving and compassionate. Hopefully by senior year, we can inspire incoming freshmen the way that the seniors inspired me.

I think it's really important to get involved with something and find your niche. I never would have envisioned myself on the robotics team if it weren't for the passion of the upperclassmen who looked like they were having the time of their lives building and making things. But here I am now, and here is my passion. Even if my passion is just the love within the team, the passion exists, and it will hold me to them until senior year.

The 5-Star System

There are so many reasons rating books is hard.

The comparison exists to make some books stand apart from the rest. I love the idea of having some favorites, some least favorites, and some in between books that leave no significant impression on you.

But what, exactly, are we comparing these books to?

In some ways, the 5-star system is rating books among genres. But because same system is used to rate books in historical fiction and fantasy, the historical fiction that I read would always have less stars. I find this frustrating because I like fantasy infinitely more than historical fiction, but I don't want to grade a good historical fiction down on the fact that it was historical fiction.

The star system is also used to compare books by a singular author. But if there's an author I love who has written books I love, I start running out of stars to differentiate the ways in which I liked the books. Perhaps one's plot was on par, and another had good characters, and yet another had a good message. Nothing is done to contrast the meaning behind the 5 stars I've given each.

Or perhaps the book is just being compared to itself. When rating books, this is the only way I can stand to do it. Does it have a good plot? Writing style? Likable characters? All of these things contribute to whether or not I like something.

But until I can explain my rating in words, the star system seems insufficient in doing what I'm trying to accomplish.

I use the 5-star system because it's universal. Goodreads uses it, and everyone understands the scale of "terrible" to "amazing." And I'm lazy, so I rarely write out my own reviews.

Despite my lack of motivation to write reviews, I still get angry whenever I think of the 5-star system. Maybe I should start rating books based on multiple categories. Maybe I'll come up with my own system sometime.