Interestingly, this thread seems to be dominated by Alumni and Mentors.
Anyways, coming from a pretty well-funded but completely student-run team, I see the views from both sides. Every year we work hard in the fall to raise money for competition season, and we usually go to three regionals a year. We are also fortunate enough to have an in-house machine shop, and a system set up where everyone is certified to use the tools.
I can certainly see this as being an unfair advantage, but even with the beautiful paint job from our powdercoat sponsor, we rarely, if ever get any hate from other teams. I guess this is probably because we only ever have students working in our pit.
As a result of our system, it bothers us slightly when we have neighboring pits with little or no students in them, because we worked hard on our bot, and would love to see how our peers had worked on theirs. I recognize that not everyone has the same benefits of a machine shop and strong traditions as we do, and that professional guidance is often necessary, but I would hope that the students would be given a larger role to play in all FRC teams. Integrating them in the design process, and every step of building the robot will be tremendously educational and memorable for the rest of their lives.
FIRST is For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology. Dean Kamen founded this competition to inspire young people. Sure they can watch the competition and be inspired, but that can be equated with watching the NBA on TV. The larger role we as students can play on the team, the more ownership we feel towards the bot and the greater satisfaction we feel at competitions. Watching the fruit of our year of labor compete is truly the most inspiration I have ever felt.
I hope I have not offended anyone. This is just my opinion coming from working on a very unique team. Cheesy Poofs, our traditional rival, has a large mentor support, but their fantastic bots inspire us to be better at what we do. No hard feelings. We look forward to competing against them at SVR next week.
PS You theoretically could buy your bot from team221.com, but I have yet to see anyone do so.
