All right, I'm just going to try to jump into this without making it a thousand words lol. When I first joined, I was a freshman and a cheerleader... I had been taking piano lessons since I was four and vocal/performance lessons for a few years. By that time I had recorded a demo and my mentality was "why spend four years of time and a lot of money in college when I could be advancing my music career!?". I happened to have a study hall for a semester that year of high school and one of our mentors would ask me every day "So, want to be an engineer yet?". I would just shrug off the question. The Granite State Regional came around, and the answer was simply yes. I'm now in my senior year of high school, one of our two "co-CEO"s (like a president/captain) on our 65-student team, and going to Florida Institute of Technology next year with a FIRST scholarship for Aerospace Engineering. Why do I do FIRST now? To somehow, hopefully, allow what happened to me to happen to at least one other person. It doesn't mean making a person go into engineering, it's encouraging an environment where kids can learn what's fun for them and feel confident about their choices. Every day I come to FIRST and think "I want my job to be just like today's meeting... oh, wait! I'm going to be an engineer!" I also mentored an FLL team this year, and an 8th grader on the team e-mailed me when he found out about my scholarship (his dad's now a mentor on our FRC team) congratulating me and sent me a wonderful letter on how I've inspired him and he can't imagine not joining the team next year. He also said that I've inspired him to mentor an FLL team when he joins the FRC team too. I almost cried... there are ways to tell that I've helped others on the team over the last couple of years find their niche, but for this kid to flat out tell me that what I've done to him he wants to do to others was eye-opening for me. I do FIRST because I want what happened to me to happen to others, and I've kept on keeping on because it's working! As a side note, I also plan on mentoring an FRC team through college
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Oh... and it's FUN! I've made so many friends not only on my team but on a lot of teams in the area. We still hang out with our friends from other teams that we've both won with and competed against
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Well, so much for not a high word count!
-Gen