Hey, Team CRyptonite!
It's great to hear that the club is still going strong. I was on the team from 2005-2008 and managed to climb all the way to the lofty heights of Drive Train Captain, Pit Boss, and Senior Class Rep during my tenure. FRC was a huge impact on my life, so when I was contacted about contributing some stories to the blog, I immediately assented by composing this story. Hope you enjoy.!
"In the realms of men, there are few things more invasive to the mind than the conviction that you can do something well. This is particularly true when that something corresponds to a well-paying job in below-average economic times. Thus it was that my good friend Kyle drug me to a CRyptonite Robotics meeting after school when I should have been going home, or at least to band rehearsal. Such begins a journey of epic scope, a journey that would change the world for ages to come. For out of cogs and wheels and gears of that club came an Engineer (i.e. me) who would solve the energy crisis, beat back global warming, and provide the world with economically viable space travel for years to come. !
Well... that may be an exaggeration. But I did become an engineer. A really good one at that (if I do say so myself (I mean, I did go to Harvey Mudd College for cryin' out loud). And that was in no small part due to the great experiences I had with FRC and CRyptonite. Honestly, I had no idea what I wanted to do before I joined this club. The Robotics Team really showed me what was possible in my future as an engineer, namely, to design and build really cool technology working in teams in the pursuit of some goal that's bigger than any single contributor. If there is only one most important thing that I took away from that club, it's that the things we can accomplish when we bring a group of motivated individuals together is truly limitless. I mean, I still marvel that it's possible to design and build an entire robot from scratch in only six weeks, and I did it three years in a row! Now I'm building cryogenic chemical plants, and the timescale is upwards of a year, but there's a part of me that still finds it immensely impressive.!
There really is nothing quite like being talented at something you truly enjoy and can engage in with a group of people you also truly enjoy. I went through a whole lot during my three years with the CRyptonite- the builds, the late nights, the ignored homework, the competitions, the successes, the disappointments, the Pit, the HR issues- and sometimes it seemed like there was nearly as much bad as there was good, but now that I've left I really only have one lasting impression of my time with the team. I wish I hadn't waited until my sophomore year to join. I think that is the single biggest sign that my experience with FRC was a good one."!
Since I left high school, I went to college and in May 2012 earned my Bachelor's Degree in Engineering from Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, CA, working on a number of cool projects. Some of the coolest were working on minimizing heat leak to a jacketed vessel containing liquid nitrogen for future application in hydrogen car technology with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and characterizing wind turbine vibrations under operational conditions for future application in monitoring turbine blade damage with Los Alamos National Laboratory.!
I now work as a Structural and Project Engineer at Cosmodyne, LLC in Seal Beach, CA. Cosmodyne designs and builds cryogenic plants for air separation and natural gas liquefaction. I am responsible for some mechanical aspects of the design and analysis and for some aspects of overall plant system integration.!
So that's me. If anyone has any questions or anything, I'd be glad to answer them. Hope everyone is enjoying this season of Robotics Competition, and Go CRyptonite!!
-Andrew Jennings Class of 2008
