There’s a registered student organization on campus with an Ivy League admission rate. Each quarter, hundreds of aspiring members reach out in hopes of joining, but even with this year’s added $250 club fee, only 8% of them will be successful.
We had more than 500 applicants this year for only 40 spots on the team,” says Husky Robotics team leader Micah Kim, a junior majoring in mechanical engineering.
Like some of the capacity-constrained majors at the UW, Husky Robotics just doesn’t have space for more members. The Engineering Annex can only hold 20 students in a lab. “And the truth is, there’s only so much work to do,” Kim adds. But there’s always space for one very special guest: Dr. Robert J. Jones.
Jones visited Husky Robotics along with Barbell Club, Husky Hooks & Needles, Dirty Dozen Student Farm Club and eight others to celebrate his first year as president of the UW. In the UW’s 2026-2030 strategic plan, Jones laid out a strategy for expanding access to capacity-constrained majors like engineering, where the UW is tied with Columbia, Harvard and Penn State as one of the top 25 engineering programs in the country.
Husky Robotics and TrickFire Robotics (UW Bothell’s robotics club) got together with President Jones (and a couple of rovers).
What makes Husky Robotics so popular? “It makes you stretch your wings, in terms of learning,” says Kim, who applied what he learned about cross-functional teams in the Husky Robotics team to an internship last summer. “Preparing you for industry is the biggest thing our members take away from Husky Robotics.”
A tactical way for students to build industry skills is by participating in the University Rover Challenge, the world’s foremost robotics competition for college students. After a rigorous selection process, 15 out of 60 teams from the U.S. (and 38 out of 116 internationally) were selected, and Husky Robotics is among the lucky few in 2026. Team members collaborate by balancing a budget, buying parts, navigating tariffs, programming the rover and abiding by strict competition rules—challenges they wouldn’t necessarily face in the classroom.
This year, the team arrives at the rover challenge prepared with advice from robotics alumni and industry sponsors, who make appearances at Husky Robotics team meetings. “The community we’ve been able to cultivate has been super awesome to see, and we’ve grown a lot in just one year,” Kim says. “We’ve set the foundation to continue to grow moving forward, so that’s pretty awesome.”
See President Jones join Husky Robotics and a dozen other UW clubs in a video recap of his first year as president: