Find two friends, one in EE and one in CS. Then build a robot. If your university offers classes, great, take them. If your professors show interest in what you are doing, terrific. But if not, pay them no attention. If they tell you you should really be taking their classes, or that what you are doing isn’t really robotics, that it isn’t interesting or important, ignore them. Nothing — no class, no seminar, no internship — will teach you as much as just designing and building something on your own. Not for credit, not for pay. Just to learn how.

I speak from experience. I built a walking machine with two friends in my freshman dorm room. All total, it probably cost us $500. This was in the days before you could easily buy embedded electronics over the internet. We used a Commodore 64 as the processor because that is what we could get. We used stock extruded aluminum from the hardware store for most of the structure. We took apart a dot matrix printer for its stepper motor, and used cheap Radio Shack electric motors to power the legs. We figured out how to make lead screws from hardware store threaded rod, nuts, and epoxy. We didn’t have anything like Adafruit or Sparkfun; we just had to figure out how to build what we needed from what we could buy in town or scrounge from the university. We learned to machine — not precision machining, but good enough — with a hack saw, a cordless drill, and a Dremel tool. We learned to debug power electronics with a $20 Radio Shack multimeter. It isn’t optimal, but it can be done.

We financed it by skipping lunches. We learned the bus schedule from campus to every hardware store within ten miles by heart. The women we had the healthiest relationships with were the cashiers. We completely pissed off our dorm floor supervisor because we were using power tools. We left aluminum shavings and solder burns all over the room.

My sophomore year we did it again, only this time it was a robotic hovercraft and we had an apartment. We sweet-talked the campus machine shop to do free machining for use, mostly because one of my two friends could do amazing drawings, the best the machinists had ever seen. We decided we couldn’t keep skipping lunch, so we went to the dean of the Honors Department to find out whether they funded student projects. They didn’t. He proposed that we write up a description of what such a program would look like, so we did. He, true to his word, found a couple thousand dollars in funding, and implemented our program. We received a $1500 grant from the program we ourselves started. One of my professors freed up some unused storage space in the basement of the CS building so we didn’t have to use our apartment any more.

What did I learn from all of this? I learned to have a broad view of robotics. I learned that designing a mechanical structure and actuation system for a robot is nontrivial. So is the power electronics. And so are the control algorithms. I learned how to solve problems that were caused by the interaction of all of these systems. This came in very handy in grad school; there are very, very few engineers who can write clean code, design mechanical systems, machine the components, and integrate them with embedded electronics. I learned drafting. I learned machining. I learning to solder. I learned how to write a research grant proposal, something none of my professors taught me. I learned to present my work in front of an audience. And I learned something that I didn’t have a word for at the time, but I learned later was called systems engineering and program management. It was my job to coordinate the work of my two friends, and the machinists, and to manage the funding and the schedule. I learned to do all of that as an undergrad.

This does not mean classes are unimportant. Take your classes and do well in them. Getting good grades is one key to making progress in your career. But classes are not the only thing — arguably, in terms of what you actually learn, they aren’t even the most important thing. My rule was, all day up until 9 pm was for being a student. 9 pm to 2 am was for being a roboticist.

External Link: Credits