Vent
I've grown to hate robotics, I'm the most depressed I've ever been and my work goes underappreciated. I just feel so so awful. I regret staying, knowing the treatment I've undergone in my years of participation. My team has never honestly valued coding (or my contribution as another working student who also has obligations outside of robotics) as much as other assets, and the weight of being solely responsible for teaching other students the little knowledge I've been skirting by on, is just too much. I know I'm responsible for not learning more or not accomplishing/working more at the beginning of this season in particular, and now it's catching up to me but it's still so frustrating and I just want to cry. I'm so behind on the code. We don't even yet have a fully built robot to test the small amount of code that has been written. The most frustrating aspect is that we have a mentor that has taught me so little and has really only held us back to a certain extent. She's written certain parts of the code that are too complicated to edit and now won't even build for some reason that the computer has no useful information or reported errors on fixing. We're coding in C++ as well which just feels stupid, which I've been told by other teams on numerous occasions. I've tried to switch our team to Java before during one off-season, with the goal of rewriting the code for an old robot, so that I would learn and have enough experience for a season to come, but I recieved no support, had no motivation, little time, and have given up since then. I know I'm greatly responsible for the amount of failure I feel but it has been so hard to participate with such little support and I finally decided to prioritize my time this season, and it's biting me in the ass. My other mentors are passive aggressive towards the coding progress and aren't the best authoritative figures either. Otherwise my experience in this program would've felt more positive, and my progress could've been better streamlined. We have competitions coming up and my biggest hope is that the mechanical parts of our robot don't work out, so that I don't have to continue caring or working towards completely unfulfulling bullshit. I'm aware that this is an awful way of thinking and I would feel horrible for my other team members, who've experienced similar levels of disrespect but truthfully not to this extent, and wouldn't deserve the horrible outcome that I'm hoping for. I've learned a lot about my character throughout my experience working in this program, but the best way to describe it feels like learning to stand up after getting beat the shit out of. I'm sorry for whining so much and at the end of the day, the answer is going to be to just keep on slaving away since it would be just as awful to let everyone down and not have a functioning robot with it being my fault. There's so much more awful shit that this team has put me through and made me feel, but it's not even really relevant and all I want to do is lock in and enter survival mode, but the weight of juggling this as well as my other classes and activities has just been so stressful and my own mental struggles have caused a great deal of executive dysfunction (I think that's the term) for me, and I find myself getting little done. I don't really know why I'm posting this but I guess let this be a lesson to stand up for yourself when necessary, take charge when necessary, and don't allow others to drag you down.