Balam

Why Balam?

In the Prepa Tec Esmeralda the school gives the students the possibility of forming part of different groups with development objectives. They depend on the different abilities of every student, connected in the same time with their professional and personal interests. There are several groups if we take in account the debate club, the prevention club, the radio club, the soccer club, the basketball club, the arts club and the robotics club. But why should a person pick one of them? What effect does it make being part of it or not?

In school students can learn several stuff, but it makes no sense to learn it and never be able to do something with it. That's what school clubs do, they invite students to apply everything they have learnt, to do something useful with it. Maybe teenagers don't realize about the changes they are causing to their future but they will as time goes by. Scholar clubs are the place where the real preparison for life takes place. Here students learn how to act according to different situations and problems, staying away from the commodity of school's ideal environment, where problems faced are way different from real life situations.

As a personal experience I chose last semester to enter a school club that shares the ideals I wanted to develop, and the abilities that I wanted to acquire. That's the robotics team. Since the beginning of my high school I stayed close to school clubs, but never lived and took advantage of any of them as I'm doing it in the robotics club named Balam. They have shown me through time that hard work and persistence get us where we want to be, as a team or as an individual, it doesn't matter.

This year we achieved the goal of classifying to the robotics World Cup in Saint Louis, Missouri. Although we didn't do great in the competition, the most important thing is what we have learnt. We came here as beginners but we head back to Mexico as a team ready to work hard in order to level up, in order to compete against the best robotics of the globe.

Finally, there's also the human part of it, maybe the most important one. As a team, problems come and go in a daily basis, so we have to learn how to act whenever we get involved in those problems. The constant teamwork has its consequences, most of the time positive ones. As time goes by, the members of the team act more like a family than like a cold robotics team. Students develop the ability of socializing as humans, all aiming to the same goals and with the same attitude. That's the important part of it.

Because of all these point is that I will never regret choosing the robotics team. It is the one that will help me take a lot of decisions based on experiences, especially in the professional part of my life. It doesn't have to be robotics for everyone, there are endless fields of knowledge around the globe. The nice part of this is finding the correct way of developing inside that special field.