There's also no 'FIRST made me realize that I needed something more than engineering' option, either ;)

I've actually been interested in ME since about 6th grade or so. Joining FIRST made me want to be an ME even more.

I have enjoyed building things since i was either 4 or 5 years old when i got my first Lego set. Fomr then on all i ever wanted for b-days or xmas was Legos, and i just kept building all the time. In 8th grade i started taking toys, small cheap electronic items and the sort apart, so i could figure out how they worked. Then freshmen year i joined FIRST. Since then my greatest passion has been building robots and ME (and some EE).

so i hope to go to WPI for ME (since WPI sponsors a team, i might still be able to do FIRST, that and they have a good music dept.)

Well, I had always wanted to be a doctor. I used to have one of those little play hospital kits, and one of my halloween costumes was a doctor. Then I saw the TLC and the Discovery Channel. Yuck. Turns out, my stomach was NOT fit to become a doc, so I decided to be a lawyer...

This "Lawyering" dream didn't last long. I have NO idea what swayed me away from it. OH! Wait, I remember, all those years of law school. I had forgotten that I hated school. At the time, I didn't know that college was NOT school...

That's when I decided to become an Electronics Engineer. That's all I knew. Then I came into school one day, and saw this "machine" in my classroom. Heck, I didn't know what it was, it looked "mechanical", and it said "Golightly Robomasters". I guessed it was a robot. Then, later that day, a crazy looking man in his work uniform turned on this crazy looking piece of "machinery". He told his story,a nd I was hesitant at first, but after that, I was hooked. I put my name on the sign up list, and that's when I joined Team #519. I love FIRST.

FIRST made me realize that every normal, legal field is stressful and involves hard work. I would like to be retired. If I have to choose a career though, it would involve either mechanical engineering or project management, although I'll probably change my mind frequently. Maybe I'll be president... that sounds fun.

I really have no clue.

I've wanted to be an engineer since 8th grade, when I participated in a math competition. I discovered which area of engineering to study this summer. I spent three weeks at Rose-Hulman modifying a remote-controlled car to be autonomous. My group, despite a bit of idiocy, was able to make ours run around in a rectangle, find an object, and return to its starting point.

I'm hooked.

Lez see, I more or less always thought about being in some kind of technical career, aerospace being my highest ambition. Um... I'm juggling between a career in 3d animation and a career in engineering. I've got inexpensive access to a great 3d animation class, so I'll go ahead and take that, but then I may attend either Purdue University in Indiana or Oklahoma State University here in Oklahoma. I'm the oddball in the group because 1. I had blue hair, and 2. I'm the only one patient enough to use 3d max. I think that FIRST was the biggest influence on my career choice because I would've never even thought about 3d animation as a possible career choice because I am not in the least bit an artistic person, but I am a wiz with computers, so it balances out as I've found this year putting together an animation in 2 weeks. I look forward to talking to anyone with simliar ambitions and hopefully I'll get the chance to meet a few people like me at the competitions comin up! I can't wait til the action starts, I'm a senior! woot!:yikes:

I guess I decided when I realized that I liked being a geek.

I attended high school in the late stone-age, before microwave ovens, cordless phones, personal computers, the internet, cheap power semiconductor devices, or high-energy permanent magnet materials were available. I was one of the geeks in the back room of the library keeping my school's 16mm movie projectors working, maintaining the air conditioning system, and fishing coaxial cable through the walls so each classroom could have a TV connection. None of this had anything to do with what was being taught in classes so I thought of it as play.

My school did not teach calculus so I went to the local college at night. No one at my school knew much about electronics, so the other geeks and I just figured stuff out as we went along, usually destroying school property in the process. We also played a lot of chess and spent way too much effort finding ways to avoid going to class.

After high school I went to a small college that had good departments of chemistry, art, and religion. It also had a small department of computer science where all the top students were geeks, but no physics or engineering. After a year there, I transferred to Georgia Tech, and that changed my life for good.

At Tech, I found out that the world is actually full of geeks, that there are almost always logical reasons why things work or don't, that the library is full of books and you can almost always find the answer you are looking for in there somewhere, and that geeks who are willing to play hard enough can get paid to play for the rest of their lives.

I stayed at Tech for about a dozen years (minus time spent at co-op jobs in the Southern California aerospace industry) and left with a PhD in electrical engineering. After that I got a job teaching and researching at the University of Missouri, where I stayed for four years. There I started a solar racing team that is still competing. I left that job nine years ago, and since then I have been developing new electronically controlled motors at Emerson.

I am 44 years old and science and technology still seem like play to me. I play FIRST because I still like teaching and I still like the company of other geeks.

Techie Comm. is 4 me
 

Before I became a part of FIRST, I wanted to become a Manufacturing Engineer. After joining FIRST, however, I realized that there's more to science, math, and technology than just engineering. When I joined the Golightly CTC Robomasters team two years ago, I was performing tasks outside of engineering. I work on our team's website, help write the Chairman's Award, and I'm the Head of Finance for our team. I enjoy performing these tasks very much. The career field that I found to be related to this is Technical Communications. While I still would want to be an engineer someday, I enjoy the field of communications the most now. I learned that FIRST allows you to explore all of your options in every aspect of science and technology. You definitely don't have to limit yourself.

I joined FIRST my junior year of high school because I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. I had always been good in science, math, and other subjects; but my choices varied from engineering, to being a pilot, business, architecture, interior design... whatever! I knew I'd be happy in any of these professions... but which one!?! Well... at the end of my rookie year I decided that I wanted to be a Mechanical Engineer. I gave the following year, my senior year on Buzz, all I had. Now, this year, I am a freshman engineering student at Northeastern University. I am still involved with FIRST as a mentor on team #125, the NU-TRONS.

I know that I'm not too technically inclined, but what robotics has also taught me is that I'm good with people. I'm using my experience with #125 as a chance to develope my management skills. Most people I talk to think I'll be a good manager or representative... they say that's just in my personality. I'm just easy to talk to!

well... gtg to class!

ByE

erin

P.S. Catch me in Manchester if you have questions about NEU... I want to recruit more FIRST'rs like myself so that we can make the NU-TRONS the powerhouse team that they could be.

Off-Topic
 

Hi Jasti...

FIRST actually HELPED me decide WHY I wanted to be an engineer. At the time, I didn't know what an engineer did, why they did it, when they did it, and how they did it. I now see that they use tools such as:

1. Pencil
2. Paper
3. Eraser
4. AutoCAD
5. Their BRAINS

Pretty easy job, if you ask me. I think it's something I will heavily enjoy doing. Being a member of FIRST, this may also lead me to be a helping engineer on Team 3350 or something like that. I hope that FIRST grows huge...I would not hesitate to even THINK about it later in the future...

I decided to become an Engineer well before I had ever even heard of FIRST. But since then the idea has continually been reinforced. I now have a general Idea of what I want to go into (Aerospace) and am continually learning new and interesting things each day.

What can I say? F.I.R.S.T got me involved. I love staying afterschol for LONG hours and getting my hands dirty. :D

From my experience in FIRST I learned what Mechanical Engineering is all about, and I liked it so much more than computer science -- which I had been intending to major in since the 4th grade -- that I switched majors to mechanical.

The change was difficult, in fact it is a lot more difficult for me to well in mechanical engineering classes than computer science, but the point is I am doing what I really enjoy now, and will not be writing code all my life now :-D

- Patrick

Grew up w/ it around me
 

Well, I have grown up with engineering all around me thanks to my mother's position in the schools of engineering at Purdue. I've met tons of engineers through her who have always tried to persuade me into engineering, even since I was little. Well, when I got into high school, I was interested in becoming a veterinarian or doing biochemistry. Unfortunately, a bad teacher experience threw vet. out the window, but I was still really interested in the sciences. I joined our FIRST team my frosh year, but I wasn't really on the technical side of things, so it really didn't impact me that much. My soph. year I took chemistry and totally loved it. I was still really interested in the sciences, and my mom was telling me a lot about biomed. engineering and all of the fun stuff they do. So that became my next area of interest. To make a long story short, by the time this year, my senior year, rolled around, I was pretty set on Chemical engineering. I took on a technical role this year, and had the best time ever in my four years on the team. Consequently, I decided that I was definitely going to go to Purdue and study chemical engineering, that way I can come back as a mentor/student advisor next year. I love this program so much that I can't imagine leaving it now. One of the people I most adore is our fearless leader, Shannon Schnepp. She's awesome, and I want to achieve as much as she has :)

I became interested in engineering when I joined FIRST this year. Being in FIRST combined with my growing interest in space science has prompted me to decide to pursue a career in aeronautical engineering.:cool: