Husky Robotics Society
Co-founder and treasurer of NU London's robotics society: <5 members to 40+ across 8 subteams in one year.
- Founding
- Leadership
- Fundraising
- Robotics
Northeastern’s London campus had no robotics society. By the end of my first year, it had one with 40+ members across eight subteams, competing in two national competitions.
Starting from under five people
We didn’t start from nothing exactly, but close to it. The London campus is new, and most of the students there are perpetually first-years, around 75% of freshmen moving to Boston to finish their degree. Because of this, almost nothing carries over year to year. We had to rebuild this society from scratch with the minimal resources available to us at this brand new campus. As Treasurer and one of four members of the executive committee, I owned more than just the budget: I made the case for the funding, decided where it should go, and justified those calls to both the committee and the school’s administration.
Recruiting itself wasn’t the hard part; we ran start-of-year events and got the word out however we could: posters around campus, friends telling friends, etc. The hard part was deciding, as a team rather than a top-down hierarchy, what the society should actually be. We landed on splitting it in two: combat robotics, six teams of three or four building small bots, and the UK national Unibots competition, two larger teams of five to ten.
We closed out the year at the campus science fair, where I designed and built mini battlebots and their arena, then set it up for anyone to battle and staffed it all day.
Eight subteams
Splitting into subteams was the structural decision that let the society scale past the size where everyone can be in one room. It gives new members a specific place to land: mechanical, electrical, software, and so on, rather than a general invitation to help.
Unibots UK 2026
Footage
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Founding as a transferable skill
Building an organization from scratch is harder than building a robot, and it’s a completely different skill. This was my second time, after running the Lakeside Robotics Club with no initial resources. I knew coming into this position what to do early: lock down funding and structure before recruiting, and give people real ownership instead of handing out tasks. Leading a group of innovative engineers each with their own ideas is a harder problem than any technical design challenge, and to this day I strive to continue improving in that regard.