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Interested in working together? Just fill out the form below. Don't like the form? That's ok, just email us. Thank you.
Interested in working together? Just fill out the form below. Don't like the form? That's ok, just email us. Thank you.
MY EXPERIENCE IN
THE U.S. AND AUSTRALIA
SAM QIAN
2025 San Francisco Regional FIRST Robotics
The culture we built: disciplined documentation, calm pit work.
The 2025 San Francisco Regional brought together more than a thousand students, mentors, and volunteers to compete, share, and learn. The event used the 2025 FRC game and ran over a full weekend of qualification matches, playoffs, award ceremonies, and pit work.
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These regionals are the lifeblood of FIRST — each regional is its own festival. Teams arrive with toolboxes, spare parts, printed CAD drawings, and a bundle of nerves. They set up pits (their backstage workshops), run practice matches, and then take the floor for a series of timed, strategic games where alliances score points by moving game pieces or completing tasks. Broadcasts of matches are often streamed, judges hand out awards, and teams trade parts and ideas in the pits. The San Francisco event was part of Week 4 of the 2025 season and had a lively local mix — teams from California plus some international visitors.
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The regional format matters because it’s a compressed snapshot of everything a team practices for: engineering design, software, field strategy, logistics, outreach, and community spirit. You’re tested not only on whether your robot performs but how well your team manages time, recovers from failures, and explains the work you did. In 2025, the San Francisco regional also showed how teamwork and documentation can matter as much as raw speed — the ranking scoreboard and awards reflect performance across many axes.
Regionals like San Francisco do more than sort robots by speed. They teach people how to work, think, and lead. If you’re building a team, focus less on “perfection now” and more on building a repeatable process and a supportive team culture. Do that, and the results, and the life lessons, will follow.
How competing brings long-term benefits and knowledge to participants
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I could list technical skills — CAD, wiring, coding — and stop there. But that would undersell what FIRST regionals give you. From my experience (and what I saw at San Francisco 2025), the real, long-term benefits fall into four categories: technical depth, transferable soft skills, community and network, and lifelong habits. Here’s how competing shapes a person beyond trophies.
1) Deep technical learning — faster and broader than a classroom
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When you’re building a robot that needs to move, pick up, sense, and respond in under two minutes, you learn engineering in fast forward. You’re not just solving textbook problems — you’re designing under constraints:
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Weight, power, and cost tradeoffs: Should your manipulator be heavier but stronger, or lighter but faster?
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Thermal and power management: How will batteries behave under a long match?
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Sensor reliability: How does your range finder react under gym lights or glossy floors?
You learn to iterate. In the weeks leading to San Francisco, teams test, fail, and test again. That iterative engineering — fast prototyping, logging failures, fixing mechanical tolerances or PID gains — is exactly what engineering firms do. The experience prepares participants for internships and real engineering roles because it trains them to move ideas into functioning hardware quickly.
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2) Transferable soft skills — the stuff employers actually ask about
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FIRST teams are small engineering companies. Team members practice:
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Project management: setting milestones (prototype, test, iterate), scheduling build sessions, and tracking parts.
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Collaboration and leadership: many teams are student-led but mentor-advised, so students learn how to coordinate, delegate, and mentor younger members.
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Communication: explaining your design to judges, writing documentation, and presenting during award interviews is huge.
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Problem-solving under pressure: when a robot dies a minute before a match, the calmest and most methodical team wins.
These soft skills are exactly what colleges and employers look for — the ability to work on cross-disciplinary teams, lead small projects, and communicate complex ideas simply.
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3) Community, networking, and mentorship
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At regionals you suddenly meet dozens of teams, industry mentors, university scouts, and potential sponsors. The friendships, contacts, and mentors you make can open internships, collaborations, and future research opportunities. The San Francisco regional draws local tech companies and universities; the environment provides a real bridge between high school robotics and higher education or industry.
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4) Lifelong habits — resilience, grit, and curiosity
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Regionals teach habits: showing up for 9 p.m. build sessions, learning from a robot’s “miserable failure” and documenting the fix, or staying patient while a sensor is re-calibrated. These habits — persistence, careful logging, and curiosity — often shape students’ academic choices and career paths. A team member who learned PLC-style thinking or embedded systems at a regional might later become a controls engineer, or start a hardware company. That ripple effect is real.
What I did — founding the team, building a winning process, and taking 1st Prize
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I started the team because I wanted to create something that mattered beyond the competition scoreboard. I wanted a group that learned together, lifted each other up, and built systems that could be reused year after year. The San Francisco Regional was our first big test — and we went in ready to learn, adapt, and aim for excellence.
Below is the play-by-play of what I actually did during the season and at the event itself — the messy, rewarding work.
1) Founding the team — recruiting and building culture
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Founding a team starts with people. I recruited classmates who were curious, not necessarily experts. I looked for students who wanted to build, teach, or learn. That meant:
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Posting flyers and demo sessions in school halls.
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Running a “try-it” day where kids soldered LEDs and drove small motors.
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Speaking to teachers to secure workspace and a faculty mentor.
But more than recruitment, I worked on culture. We set simple ground rules: treat mistakes as data, document everything, do post-mortem after every failed test, and share credit. That culture paid off — when pressure hit at San Francisco, people stayed calm and collaborative.
2) Establishing design-to-build workflow
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From the very first weekend, I wanted a repeatable process. That’s how we could improve each week. I implemented a practical workflow:
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Concept sketches — quick ideas, three options, pick one to prototype.
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Rapid prototyping — 3D print or laser-cut a rough part to test fit.
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Integration tests — combine subsystems early to find clashes.
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Iteration logs — every change gets recorded: who changed it, why, and the test result.
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Pit procedures — checklists for pre-match inspection and rapid repairs.
This workflow meant fewer last-minute surprises. When something did fail in San Francisco, we could quickly identify the last change and roll back or patch.
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3) Chief designer & technician duties — hands-on from CAD to soldering
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My role was both visionary and practical. I led the robot design and did the hands-on work:
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CAD and mechanical design: I created the chassis layout, defined mounting holes, and modeled the manipulator in CAD so it fit within the robot envelope. I also designed quick-release mounts to swap toolheads fast.
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Fabrication: I cut aluminum rails, printed parts, and fabricated fixtures. I oversaw tolerance checks and drove assembly sessions.
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Electrical wiring: I laid out wiring harnesses, selected connectors, and color-coded cables so pit repairs would be faster. I taught the team to use heat-shrink and strain reliefs.
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Control & sensors: I worked with programmers to implement encoder feedback loops, tune PID for smooth movement, and integrate sensors (like line sensors and ultrasonic range finders).
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Testing & debugging: I ran endurance tests, stress tests, and field simulations to replicate the game environment. When parts failed, I designed hardened replacements or workarounds.
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Pit commander on match day: I managed repairs, battery swaps, and last-minute calibrations. I also coordinated who would run which checks and who would document the fixes.
This combination of planning and hands-on work made our robot both fast and reliable. The design decisions we made about modularity and repairability paid off during the event.
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4) Orchestrating team training and strategy
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Building the robot is only half the job. I recruited and trained team members:
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Driver practice: we scheduled regular driver sessions, recorded laps, and refined joystick sensitivity.
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Role rotations: every student tried at least three roles (driver, technician, pit crew) so we had redundancy.
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Strategy sessions: we studied match footage from other teams, practiced alliance selections, and rehearsed match tactics.
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Emergency drills: practiced quick fixes for detached encoders or stripped gears — we turned repair drills into timed games to build speed and calm.
This training ensured that when matches started, everyone knew their job and could execute under pressure.
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5) Event week — what actually happened at San Francisco
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At the San Francisco regional, the pace was relentless: matches every 10–15 minutes, calibration, and pit work constantly. Our pre-match checklist included: battery voltage check, wheel alignment, encoder verification, and camera calibration (for vision-based autonomous routines).
We had failures (as every team does): a loose connector during a qualification match, a stripped gear on the manipulator, and a vision routine fooled by reflective tape at the venue. But because of the logs and modular parts, fixes were quick: swap a harness, replace a gearbox module, run a rapid vision recalibration. Our pit drills paid off — we rarely lost more than a match while repairing.
The result: consistent qualification rankings, clean matches, and ultimately, 1st Prize at the regional. That wasn’t luck. It was the product of preparation, redundancy, teamwork, and the habit of learning quickly from small failures.
