Roy Briggs is a busy Warrenton senior.

He’s a drum major this year after playing the French Horn in previous years. He’s involved with the robotics team. And he’s also joining the scholar bowl team and starting out with the National Honor Society this year.

He also just completed all the work to become an Eagle Scout, including his project where he built bluebird houses for the Knights of Columbus in Pendleton.

Briggs says everything he’s learned along the way will help him as he enters his final year of high school before heading off to college to pursue his degree in either computer science or computer engineering.

DARE TO EXCEL: Wright City senior class president Tayla Payne

Q: What got you involved in the band?

“You start out in elementary school, fifth grade, you’re going into sixth grade. You say ‘do you want to do band or not band?’ I was like, that sounds cool. I want to play an instrument but as I went through it and especially once I hit high school and we went into marching band, I realized, especially through my experience with Scouts, I think I could help make this band better and I could help kind of run the show and improve things.”

Q: What are your plans to make the band better this year?

“A big thing the band has been focusing on this year is using their student leadership more. In the past, everything has been on the director. The band does visuals where everyone has to move around, it used to be that the director teaches that. But now it’s a little different. Now that’s being put on the student leadership and the drum major’s role is to go around and make sure that everybody’s doing everything properly. So during band camp we all go around and everyone's doing fundamental work. And I would say something focused on for me would be culture, having a positive attitude and making sure everybody feels like they know what’s going on and that they’re enjoying themselves and having fun.”

Q: How did you get involved with the robotics team?

“I’ve done programming in the past and through middle school I taught myself how to program. And when I joined the high school, I heard that they have a robotics team where they build a robot and also program it and have an autonomous thing where it does things on its own. It's in Java, which is the language that I learned. So I was like I want to do that. And I just showed up one day and said ‘hey, how can I help?’ And everything went from there and people graduated and now it’s my turn to run the show.”

DARE TO EXCEL: Former Warrenton Senior Emily Likes

Q: How are you going to use robotics and band to help you in the future?

“I'm probably going into S&T to go into either computer science or computer engineering. And definitely I think robotics has helped a lot with that. Music, to me, it’s always just been this enriching, fun thing. Programming is work but music is just something that I really enjoy doing and it’s a lot of fun putting on a show for other people to enjoy.”

Q: How do you think being an Eagle Scout is going to help you with your college goal and as you move forward in life?

“The leadership experience, I think, has been immensely valuable. I don’t think I could have become drum major, out of everybody who applied, if I hadn’t had my Scout experience beforehand with all of that leading. I had to do service projects and things like that. And I learned how you do community service. The logistics of the Eagle Scout project was a very big thing for me. It’s something I never had to do before. All of that planning and organizing people and doing paperwork. And now I’ve seen it all. So if I want to do something like that or if I’m told you’re doing this, I’ll have that experience that I wouldn’t have had otherwise.”

DARE TO EXCEL: Former Wright City senior Cassie Reash

Favorite food: Our homemade peach chocolate chip ice cream

Favorite class: Band

Favorite band: Pink Floyd

Favorite song: “Time”

Favorite place to visit: Colorado

About the author: Jason Koch is the editor of The Warren County Record, and covers local news and government for the newspaper. He has won multiple awards from both the Indiana and Illinois APME and from the Illinois Press Association. He can be reached at 636-456-6397 or at jason@warrencountyrecord.com