By Stephanie Diehl, BAE Systems communications

Maddie Burris’ father was a contractor, and she grew up around power tools, but it was her love of outer space that got her hooked on engineering. While attending a NASA-funded middle school, her class learned about the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. The lesson included a Lego robotics project, which Maddie says “definitely opened the door” for her.

“That robotics project made me realize how much I really enjoyed building things that interacted with an environment and had to have a closed loop—like sensing and acting,” she said.

Fast forward to freshman year of high school, and Maddie was talking to her physics teacher about the project. Coincidentally, the teacher had just come back from attending a FIRST® competition as a spectator and was looking to start a team at her school. Maddie had no way of knowing back then that this would be a life-changing conversation.

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Be the actuator between the idea and reality

Eric Mercer felt right at home on his FIRST® LEGO® League team in middle school. He enjoyed playing with Legos, but more than that, he had grown up using computers and felt comfortable programming the team’s creations to drive around and do things.

“But when I got to FRC (FIRST® Robotics Competition) in high school,” he recalled, “it was just incredible. That was the big spark—the real catalyst of ‘this is what I want to do.’”

FRC gave Eric his first introduction to object-oriented programming, and he dove in enthusiastically with the help of the team’s mentors, who often were learning right alongside them.

“It was just one of those things where it clicked. If someone said, we need to make a motor move, I could do that. And now we need to make the motor smart? I had the tools to do that, too. It was instant gratification in a big way—this was like football for engineers.”

Build an entire path from a single brick

Maddie didn’t know that her first FIRST robot would end up being a “brick”—or that it would be the start of a near-decades long journey to the FIRST Hall of Fame.

Soon after she expressed interest, her high school teachers received a grant to start up a FIRST® Tech Challenge (FTC) team just 13 days before the competition. Their robot was not very successful by conventional standards.

“We burned out all four motors in one match,” Maddie recalled with a laugh. “So we had a robot that couldn’t move for the rest of the event. But because of the way the team interacted with other teams and embraced the spirit and strategy of the competition, we actually wound up scoring fairly highly, and we won the Inspire Award.” That award qualified them to go to the FIRST Championship that year, an event that is truly unlike any other.

Did you know? For more than 25 years, BAE Systems and FIRST® have partnered to inspire students in STEM.

Teams normally have two routes to qualify for the Championship. One is by winning in regional competitions, where they partner with other teams’ robots in a 3-on-3 match to complete the assigned challenge and score points. The other route is what the FIRST organization calls “More Than Robots®” and is just as important: teams that are most successful at inspiring and helping others. Many teams work within their communities to mentor newer groups or introduce younger children to STEM concepts.

Maddie’s team huddled in their hotel at the FIRST Championship in Atlanta and talked about their desire to return the following year, but this time for FRC. “Our mentor told us, well, you have two options to earn a spot,” she said. “Either you win the local event with your robot, or you make an impact in your community and try to go for the Chairman's award. We just saw the magnitude of the Championship, and how exciting it was, and the spirit of people helping each other—the ‘Coopertition®’ and Gracious Professionalism.® We knew that we wanted to get more people involved and share that with them. That's how we could make an impact.”

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Prepare so you can seize your moment

There’s no doubt Eric was positively impacted by FIRST, and much of that was due to his mentors. Not only did they help him learn technical skills, they gave him professional inspiration. “One of my mentors just embodied the kind of person I wanted to be—a successful person making a difference in the world, and who wouldn’t want to do that? Whether it’s protecting those who protect us as an engineer at BAE Systems, or giving back to the greater FIRST community, the program laid a foundation of the values and skills that I use in my day-to-day,” he said.

Three photos of Eric. One standing next to FIRST team 319's robot, him as a child meeting FIRST co-founder Woodie Flowers, and a photo of the 319 robot in action.

As a high-school student, Eric was already on a great trajectory, but thanks to his mentors and experience, he had the confidence and readiness to pivot when an opportunity arose. “My high school’s motto was ‘personalize your education to maximize your personal success’. And I was taking the classes that would get me to what I wanted to do, which at that time was coding,” he said.

“However, during my junior year while starting my college search, I learned about a program that let me skip my senior year and start as a college freshman in an engineering program. And that really allowed me to go out there and do something unconventional and get the skills that I needed, to do what I'm doing today.”

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Gather data points as you go

Meanwhile, Maddie’s FIRST team got to work. They started up 13 FIRST LEGO League teams in one year and introduced the program to Northern Arizona. They proceeded to win the Chairman's Award and then qualify for the Championship every year since, long after Maddie had graduated and headed off to college.

“I knew that I wanted to be an engineer,” Maddie said. “Through FIRST I was able to discover different schools outside of my state.”

She moved east, got a degree in Robotics Engineering, and joined the Engineering Leadership Development Program (ELDP) at BAE Systems.

Maddie likes the challenge of taking on new roles. “Every position that I've had, it's something new and different, and it helps me learn more about what I'm interested in. Like Eric, I like the instant gratification of seeing what you’re doing actually work,” she said.

Today she works in our Space & Mission Systems business, making a difference in the same domain that sparked her interest in engineering as a child.

“At each step, I feel like it's been more exploration rather than heading to a destination,” she explained. “I'm kind of just consuming my career and experiencing things, and sometimes I land in positions where I don’t feel the spark. But then there are times where I'm in a role that I love, and I discover that it really scratches that engineering itch. And I keep that as a data point for my career path. When new opportunities arise, I can ask does it correlate with my data of what I've appreciated and enjoyed?”

Maddie smiled. “So yeah, my career has definitely been a little bit of just a wandering path through different engineering experiences.”

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Share the challenge

Eric noted that it’s important to stay curious and keep learning. As a mentor now to his former FIRST team, he can see the difference in technologies that students are working with today compared to what he used.

“When I first went back and was a mentor, it was hard to actually separate myself from being a student because I kept thinking, it's so much fun and we're building robots again,” he said. “The world they live in is different, but their challenges are often similar. As a mentor, I can share how I overcame my own challenges, and there are also lots of public domain resources to help them with their robot, as well.”

In Eric’s time as an engineer at BAE Systems, he has worked on a variety of programs, from night vision goggles to precision guidance kits to electronic warfare for fighter jets, and now he does research and development. He believes that the FIRST team he mentors gives students their first chance to experience working with a multi-disciplinary team, much like the real world. They do daily stand-ups and discuss their blockers, and while some may specialize in software or mechanical skills, they need to understand how all of the systems work together to be as successful as possible.

“They get a systems background working on these robots,” he said. “They might not realize it until later when they're maybe juniors or seniors. That's when it really starts to click and you see that light bulb switch on. And they say, I get it now. And then they’re able to go and teach the next generation behind them. That’s really what FIRST is all about.”

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Share the excitement

In 2024, Maddie got the call that her former team had won a spot in the FIRST Hall of Fame. She was beside herself with excitement for them, as it brought back all the memories of helping to light the spark at her school and fan it into a flame.

Trying to summarize what FIRST does for students isn’t easy, because it’s so enormous and multi-faceted, but Maddie thinks a big one is building confidence. “There are a lot of students that join the team and they're very quiet. And they won't speak up. And then next thing you know, you're at your second competition and they are jumping up and down, dancing with the mascots. Or they're the ones grabbing the console and putting in some last-minute code changes before you run out on the field. So through this program, they gain growth and confidence in themselves. FIRST gave me the opportunity to figure out where I could go and the confidence to go beyond the world I knew.”

Stick with it, and you’ll change the world

Before they were engineers, they were students building robots for their high schools’ FIRST teams and designing their futures. What advice do Maddie and Eric have for aspiring engineers?

“Growth happens when you’re outside your comfort zone,” said Maddie. She said it’s important to stay curious because that’s where innovation happens. As she put it, “You need a disturbance in the system to change its direction. It’s easy to get complacent and decide a concern isn’t worth raising, or you’re too tired or there’s not enough time, but if you stay curious and speak up with your input, you’ll be more successful as an engineer.”

Eric added, “Always go out and learn and do that which inspires you, and don’t be afraid to fail.”

Persistence is one of the strongest attributes he believes an engineer can have. “You have to notice when something isn’t right and ask, what can we do to make this better?”

As an engineer, he said, the thing often standing between the problem and the solution is you. “And if you give up, then it's not going to get solved. So stick with it.”

“Students sometimes get nervous,” Maddie said. “They think, what if I’m not good enough? Or what if a school is too expensive? Or what if a project is too hard? I tell them, don’t be your own blocker. Go for it. Apply to that school. Apply for that scholarship. Take that internship in a different state. Just lean into it and find the things you truly enjoy. Follow that trail to what interests you and build a career on it.”

It can be hard, Eric agreed, but nothing worth doing is ever easy. Pursuing a degree in STEM, particularly engineering, is one of the best things students can do to set themselves up for success in today's world.

“Those are the people who will change the world and really make a difference,” he said.

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Discover more about our partnership with FIRST and additional ways we impact the community here.

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