Engineering a career, and finding workers, through high school robotics

Detroit — Nine years ago, Samia Rahman and her classmates from the all-girls Detroit International Academy demonstrated the robot they built through the FIRST robotics program to DTE Energy employees during their lunch hour at the energy company's downtown offices.

As captain of the robotics team, Rahman had to stand before the DTE employees and explain how they built the machine — and make a business case to the company that financially sponsored her team, the Pink Panthers.

After the demonstration, a DTE manager approached the team's mentor and inquired about Rahman and whether she would be interested in a summer internship.

"We had business cards, of course, being a high school student," said Rahman, who handed the DTE manager her contact information.

Rahman has been in and around DTE ever since, interning at the company throughout college and becoming a full-time operational analyst after getting an engineering degree from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Mich.

Her exposure to one of Detroit's largest employers came solely through FIRST Robotics, a 30-year-old organization that has turned robot-building into a team sport in high schools across Michigan.

FIRST — which stands for For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology — is bringing its world championship competition to Detroit on April 26 for a four-day gathering of more than 35,000 students, parents and team coaches at Ford Field and Cobo Center. The event and spotlight on Detroit underscores the growing popularity of an extracurricular activity seen by many potential employers as a critical way to expose students to careers in science, technology, engineering and math.

Beyond contraptions that pick up and move blocks and other objects in competitions, the robotics program has created a pipeline of young talent that companies like DTE, General Motors Co. and auto supplier Magna International Inc. have been tapping in recent years for engineering, problem-solving, teamwork and communications skills.

"It's kind of like a business within itself where you're working with your own team, like a company, and you have to market it … get the funding you need to build the robot as robust as it must be," said Rahman, who now mentors a robotics team through the Hope Center in Detroit.

Businesses that have sponsored the robotics teams over the years are not just doing it for charity.

The recruiters at some longtime business sponsors have added a question to their job applications asking if the prospective employee participated in FIRST Robotics in high school or not, said Donald Bossi, president of Manchester, NH-based FIRST.

Because of the trials and tribulations students tackle while trying to build a machine, the experience is viewed by employers as similar to critical thinking and problem-solving challenges they'll face in the workforce, Bossi said.

"It really, really gives them a leg up," Bossi said in an interview.

From 'Little League' to GM

More than 700 robotics teams will descend on Detroit for the competition from a network of 61,000 teams globally spread out across 86 different countries, including more than 500 student-led robotics teams in Michigan.

The high school students use bandsaws, drills and computer programs to design, construct, engineer, tinker and fine-tune their robots.

The machines are remote-controlled by students who have to program and steer them through competitions to pick and move objects and maneuver around obstacles.

Robotics teams are underwritten by sponsors and guided by volunteer mentors.

"It's a huge undertaking for those who do volunteer," said Crystal Whetzell, marketing and communications manager at Magna Internatioinal's seating group based in Novi, Mich. Whetzell has volunteered for 17 years as a mentor to Novi High School's robotics team, Frog Force Team 503.

"I'll get somebody across the participation field coming to me to say, 'You don't know what this has done to turn my kid's life around. He now has a focus,'" Whetzell said of the impact of the robotics competitions.

As the program has grown, FIRST has spread to the middle and elementary school levels using LEGO blocks.

The LEGO leagues have created a natural pipeline for the high school teams and now employers, said Joaquin Nuno-Whelan, chief engineer for next-generation SUVs at General Motors.

"Think of [how] a championship baseball team needs to have strong Little Leagues feeding into strong high school teams, which feed into college and professional teams," Nuno-Whelan said in an interview. "We're using that kind of model from within Detroit to say, 'OK, if we want to hire engineers to come work at GM that are job-ready, what do we need to do up and down this pipeline."

Led by Nuno-Whelan, the Detroit-based automaker has sponsored two teams in the Motor City for the past four years through Detroit Cristo Rey High School and the Detroit Hispanic Development Corp.

"FIRST robotics has really built up my mind to see whether or not I want to do mechanical engineering," said Miguel Jarquin-Lopez, a senior at Detroit Cristo Rey.

Cristo Rey High School has paired the FIRST Robotics team with its science curriculum and the school's unique work-study program in which students work one day a week for their entire four years of high school at a paid job that helps underwrite their tuition.

Nuno-Whelan supervises eight student-workers in engineering at the GM Tech Center in Warren. GM has more than 50 Cristo Rey students on its payroll.

In four years, the school's robotics team has started to produce future engineering prospects for GM. This summer, GM will have its first group of Cristo Rey graduates working as college interns, Nuno-Whelan said.

If they intern all four summers of college at GM, they'll graduate with seven years of robotics experience and internships and be at the front of employment line, he said.

"So they come out not only caught up and ready to join the workforce, but they come out ready to dominate, ready to lead in the workforce," Nuno-Whelan said. "And that's really the model we're setting here."

Milton Martinez, a global diagnostics strategist at GM's Milford Proving Grounds, mentors a FIRST team through Detroit's Cesar Chavez High School that qualified for the world championships this week.

He credits his career path in engineering to being exposed to robotics 20 years ago in high school in Texas.

"I can draw a straight line from FIRST Robotics in Texas to my job here in Michigan," he said. "It made me a better engineer, and I think these teams help the students become better engineers as well."

'Gracious professionalism'

For Rahman, her career path also grew from the robotics team a high school biology teacher talked her into joining a decade ago. She's especially gratified to be able to encourage other girls of color to try it out.

The students are not just judged on the skill of the robot, but how they present it to judges on the competition floor.

Working at DTE, Rahman has found a lot of parallels between the processes of FIRST Robotics and the business cases she has to make for improving the delivery of electricity.

"You need the spirit, you need the image of the robot, the team and gracious professionalism and helping other teams out," she said. "That's really the big community that FIRST entails."