Johnathan Rankin

It was freshman year, and I was a failure. I was on my way to the admissions office to drop out of college. I was early for my appointment with the counselor, so I took a walk around some university buildings I hadn’t seen before. In the window of an old brick building, I saw something that would change my life.

It was a machine about the size of a small child. It was orange, and it moved in ways I had never seen before. I was mesmerized. While squishing my nose against the glass like an extremely conspicuous stalker, a half-bald professor came outside and tapped me on the shoulder.

“Hello, my name is Adam. Your nose is smudging my windows. Want to come in and see what I’m working on?”

After the terror of being caught wore off, I agreed to his offer.

As I walked into his lab, I was amazed at what I saw. These orange machines were everywhere! Zipping around faster than I had ever seen anything move, it was almost like they were dancing to an amazing, high-pitched symphony of sounds and lights. There were wires and cameras and lasers and a whole bunch of incredible things I had never seen before. I had no idea what I was looking at, but it somehow just felt right. I could almost hear these machines whispering my name. “Johnathan! Come play with us!” I just stood there with my mouth open, like an idiot.

Adam invited me over to one of the orange machines and handed me a TV screen with a large cable attached. He said,

“This is a teach pendant. It’s used to program a robot.”

“Robot? You mean like C-3PO or R2-D2?”

“No,” he said. “This is a KUKA robot. They’re used to manufacture things.”

Growing up in the country and working on engines my whole life, I had never considered how things were manufactured. High-technology topics were not exactly household conversation and I didn’t have good enough grades or confidence to make it into the local technology high school. By now, I was seeing Adam more as a mad scientist than a college professor.

Over the next 20 minutes, Adam gave me a crash course in creating my first path. Then he uttered a sentence that would change my life forever:

“I have to go teach a class. Feel free to play around for a while. I’ll be back in an hour or so.”

Knowing what I know now, who in their right mind would leave an unknown freshman stalker-kid with a $30,000 robot and no supervision? Adam was a different kind of professor. He was more of an enabler who taught you some things along the way.

While he was gone, I pressed buttons faster than a pre-teen playing "snake" on their first Nokia cell phone (yes, I'm over 40). I felt alive in a way I had never experienced before. When he came back, I had created a 100-point path that picked up a ping-pong ball and threw it into a red Solo cup. Then it danced around like a crazy person. You can probably guess what I was doing the night before.

When Adam returned, he looked at my program and then looked at me.

“Have you done this before?”

“No,” I said. “First time.”

He smiled and said, “You wrote a better program than my second-year students.”

For the first time in my educational career, someone said I did something well. I felt like Superman.

When I looked at the clock, I realized I was 15 minutes late for my meeting with the admissions office. “I have to go—I’m late for a meeting.”

“Where are you off to?” he asked.

I told him I was going to drop out of school and go home to work at the local golf course.

“Please don’t drop out yet. Change your major and give me one semester. Then you can decide if you still want to drop out.”

I took Adam up on his offer. I changed my major from Mechanical Engineering to Advanced Manufacturing Technology. I started to get nearly perfect grades. I ended up retaking all my core engineering classes and aced them. I had found something new in my life: motivation and confidence.

KUKA robots and a balding professor named Adam Stienecker saved my college career and ultimately changed my life.

These days, people who know me well call me the “robot guy.” They always tell me I love robots more than people (not true, of course… but close). I do love robots. More than that, I love that I get to do what I love while teaching people to love them as well.

Johnathan Rankin, aka “TheeMrRoboto”