Re: Stay or Not
 

I would say stay and learn how to manage your time wisely. We have students on our team in band, drivers ed, STEM school, and etc. but the one thing we enforce on the team is for students to get school work done and then they can work on the team. FIRST is about sending students to higher education that revolves around science, technology, engineering, and mathematics and allowing your grades to suffer due to FIRST defeats the purpose and mission of FIRST. We even had a talk with our team to take advantage of opportunities like this Princeton Review Class for the SATs. The Princeton Review students have been doing fine tackling that class and FIRST at the same time and if they end up spending all of robotics studying then so be it, we work really hard to not depend on one student alone.

The culture on our team is that it's not just a few students who carry the weight but the entire team pitches in equally and when they can and it's paid off quite nicely, I'm overly excited to see how well they'll do at Lone Star :) .

From my experience, I decided to not do this internship back in high school and do FIRST instead and right now I'm happy with that decision because I knew back then I'll end up in an engineering career anyway and the actual job is going to be more rewarding than the internship itself and the thing is I'm really happy I now mentor and volunteer a lot but I'm still grateful that I had that moment in time where I was a student of FIRST, it gave me so many life skills that I'm so happy that I learned to pick up before I got tossed into the real world.