“My participation in FIRST® definitely influenced the course of my education and my career goals,” says Booz Allen Associate Ashley Cowall. Ashley, a FIRST® (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) alumna, wasn’t the ‘artsy’ type, so she took drafting as a high school freshmen to fulfill her arts requirement. “My drafting teacher encouraged me to join our school’s FIRST® Robotics Competition team. During my 4 years with the team, we went to two world championships, won a Chairman’s Award, and won the Entrepreneurship Award the first year it was offered. I loved my experiences with FIRST.”
Initial involvement with FIRST turned into employment at a FIRST-operated summer camp. The camp director encouraged Ashley to apply to a month-long summer program offered by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for rising high school seniors. She was accepted into and attended the program—and the rest is history: She graduated MIT in 2010 with a degree in Operations Research, or as she calls it, “the science of better.”
“I hadn’t been thinking of applying to MIT at all. In fact, the norm was that fewer than 20 percent of kids in my high school left the state for college. If not for my experiences with FIRST, I don’t think I would have gone to MIT. FIRST opened doors for me.”