What Looking for Sponsorships Taught Me About Engineering

Why the finances team has the most important people in our engineering design team

In September 2025, I joined UBC Thunderbots, a student engineering design team at the University of British Columbia. The primary goal of the design team is to build autonomous soccer robots to compete in the Small Size League of the international RoboCup competition and conference. When I was accepted to be on the team last year, I was most looking forward to developing my software engineering skills, but along the way, I learned a valuable lesson about what allows engineering innovation to happen.

TODO: copy the rest of this post later once images can be loaded