Quote:
Originally posted by Ken Loyd
I feel that the companies should come first. In our case our sponsor puts up a large sum of money. My ego is able to play second fiddle to the one who pays for me to play.
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I'm going to have to agree on this one. In the pat, our sponsor has given more than $50,000 and I think a little name-recognition is the least they deserve.
<rant>
The one thing that does bug me is the teams where the the competition itself is run more by the engineers and sponsors than by the students. There is nothing that makes me more angry than walking by a pit area and seeing 5 engineers busily working on the robot while a 15 students sit in the aisle and play cards or sleep. I'm not saying that the engineers should have
no role at the competitions, quite the contrary in fact. I believe they should be there to teach students when something goes horribly awry and none of the students know how to fix it. For example, when our arm pivot snapped in half two years ago, we had no idea how to get the broken part of the screw out since the head had snapped completely off! One of the engineers then showed us how to drill a small hole to get it out, but he let us actually do it. Yes, the engineers want to win and they deserve to given the amount of time they put into FIRST. However, they should win by being good teachers, not by being good doers.
</rant>