During Pascack Valley Junior Kareena Shah’s first year on the Pascack Pi-oneers, the PV district robotics team, she said that she had faced imposter syndrome, thinking, “am I supposed to be here? I don’t know what’s going on.”

Shah said that it was easy to doubt herself, being a high school student from the “middle of nowhere”.

“How can I possibly make a change?” Shah said. “But, I think even small things like reaching out to people from around the world, can still make a change that can impact so many different types of people.” 

Shah said that participating in the engineering section of robotics, as well as working on the Pi-oneers Initiative Ready Set Speak gave her more confidence, and showed her she was capable of making change. 

Shah explained that Ready Set Speak, a subdivision within the Pascack Pi-oneers, is a website created to help kids on the autistic spectrum, specifically with speaking disabilities. Videos are created in both Spanish and English that teach kids how to say certain words, with varying levels of difficulty. 

“As the videos progress, the words become sentences and those simple sentences become more complex sentences,” Shah said. “So basically, in those videos students are talking very slowly, articulating their words.”

Pascack Hills Senior Ishaan Makhija, who leads the Ready Set Speak subdivision, said that it is part of an outreach initiative for the Pascack Pi-oneers.

“When you think of robotics you think of the mechanical side which is like building robots, but then we also have our management outreach and design,” Makhija said. “So this is sort of the outreach side,  where we try to reach out to the local community in different ways, like community service and helping people.”

Shah said they are looking to expand it globally, already reaching out to schools in South Africa. They want to implement this so it is accessible to not only English or Spanish speaking countries, but also countries such as places in Asia and Europe. 

“It’s [been] a lot of fun the past year and I’m definitely grateful to be a part of [this program],” Shah said. “I’ve met so many people from around the world. I’m 16 and I’m getting to meet people from everywhere, [which is] it’s really awesome.”

Shah said that balancing her workload of school along with her role in robotics isn’t easy. She finds that there is minimal time to work on her homework and project, due to the fact that they are at robotics many times late after school. 

“I definitely got tired,” Shah said. “I was like ‘oh my god, I’m gonna [have] robotics again [today]’. But when you walk into the room the environment is so energizing and everyone’s having a fun time. Even though it’s hard work, we still connect through that hard work, and we are all going through it [together].”

Although Shah said she has found robotics to be overwhelming at times, she has gathered so many life skills. 

“I’ve learned so much from [our coaches and mentors], not only [about] engineering and learning how to build a robot, but also soft skills, you know, reaching out to people, speaking with people, and being open,” Shah said. “I think that’s definitely going to be a major part of what I bring when I grow older and work in the workforce.”