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Building More Than Robots: How Engineering Taught Me to Lead

By Ayva Hanks, Media Power Youth Advisory Board Member

When I first joined my school’s robotics team, I thought leadership was about giving directions, making sure deadlines were met, and the robot actually worked when we pressed the start button. But somewhere between broken gearboxes, and endless redesigns, I realized leadership was something completely different. It wasn’t about being in charge. It was about building something, not just a robot, but a team.

Engineering a robot is never a straight line. There are moments when things click perfectly, like when a prototype finally runs a clean test, and there are moments when you wonder if you’ll ever get it to work again. On the team, I learned that leadership is kind of like engineering in that way: it’s all about iteration. You try, fail, adjust, and try again. Some of my proudest moments came not from a perfect design, but from watching my teammates problem-solve together after something went wrong. That’s when I saw real leadership happen, not from me giving answers, but from creating space for everyone else to contribute theirs.

One of the biggest lessons robotics taught me is that engineering is a team sport. The best designs come from collaboration, from mechanical, programming, and design teams all working in sync. As a leader, I learned that my job wasn’t to have all the ideas, but to connect them. Sometimes that meant sitting quietly while someone explained a new mechanism or encouraging a first-year member to share their thoughts. And sometimes, it meant admitting when I didn’t know something and learning right alongside everyone else.

Now, as a member of the Youth Advisory Board, I’m excited to take those lessons beyond the workshop. Being on the Youth Advisory Board reminds me that leadership isn’t just about building robots, it’s about building opportunities for others to lead too. I see it as a chance to keep growing, to listen to different perspectives, and to apply that same engineering mindset, test, learn, improve, to how I lead and serve my community.

If robotics has taught me anything, it’s that youth leadership is hands-on work. It’s about building, fixing, redesigning, and trying again, with both robots and people. And just like in engineering, the process is never perfect, but it’s always worth it.