This article was revised on March 5

A short break during the application season

While it comes, the application seasion, full of tension, sadness and happiness. At this time, just after finsihing submitting all UC applications, I decided to join this competiton held in Foshan, Guangdong, which is a prosperous city around the Guangzhou. It is a short break for me, for I have some time to reflect the early application season including EA and UC and better think how could I improve in the future. Also, I haven’t taken any VEX competition for almost a year due to the COVID. It is the best time for me to catch up with this brand new season and implement my new-learned knowledge in real match.

Unexpected

6 AM, we arrived the Airport. Checking in, boarding, preparing for taking off. All is fine untill our flight was cancelled due to mechanical problems after staying for almost an hour. Fortunately, our supernatural-power coach Mr. Han booked the earliest flight after that at once.

We even got an upgrade for no extra cost. This was the first time I was at super economic class and took a domestic flight with a wide-body aircraft Boeing 777. All in all, it was a pleasant air experience even some small episode happened.

Unexpected II

Everything was OK before the morning of the first competiton day. I debugged the autonomous program for half a night (the quickest I’ve ever done) and the autonomous session ran well. However, when we reached in the actual competiiton field, everything changed. Our chassis was out of shape for some reasons. The machine even could not go straight in dirver mode. We didn’t solve the problem all along. Our solution was dropping the high-score auto program for safety. I did as team members insisted otherwise we had to rebuild the entire chassis within a night plus giving up the first-day matches.

friends

This time I would like to talk about our own big team. Since most of team members come from 11 grade, which I sort of unknown before. I had a chance to interact with them more throughly. They are all great people with talent and persistence. Like Mukai, who called me Brother Red Bull since I drank too much Red Bull for keeping focus on programming. I was exausted during the competition but I saw they were the same tired as I was, which I didn’t acheive when I was in 11 grade. They have my respects and I believe our school team will be more and more unite and powerful with them.

Maybe this is my last chance

The competition might be my last competition in high school and besides competition, I wanted to achieve some small wishes. Actually there was only one: to take a photo with Jessica, a girl in my team, who has talented in desinging and other good qualities that I admired a lot. Yes, I did it. Just for a memorial of my colorful high-school life.

Results are not important, what is important is the unique experience and people who will never come back at this time