Quote:
Originally Posted by Patrick Chiang
However, keep in mind some teams simply reside in geographic locations where their school district has room in their budget for robotics. It's actually fantastic that they're driving money in their area towards robotics and are helping inspire people. It just seems rather unfair to me (and un-inspiring for students not lucky enough to live those areas) that they have an instant advantage at the start.
|
Patrick- as a mentor for a decently successful rookie team in the heart of West Philadelphia with zero, and I mean ZERO, support from a school or the Philadelphia school district, I find your statement here highly irrelevant. Teams who relied on the district in the past have all died out. We are fully independent in raising money, finding a place to work, finding mentors, finding in-kind donations, and finding machining sponsors. Our main machining sponsor is located 2 hours away from our team, so please don't give the excuse that location factors into this.
A team that blames their environment for their lack of resources is, in my honest opinion, not trying hard enough. (To a certain extent)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Patrick Chiang
By the way, the "life isn't fair" excuse is most often used by elites who are comfortable with their position in society (I'm not implying you guys are  ). Pretty much every case of socio-economic injustice and discrimination in the US during the last 30 years or so are linked to the "life isn't fair, deal with it" position. |
Patrick let me ask you something - how long have you been in this program? How long have you been mentoring? Were you also ever a student on one of these teams?
Most of us saying that life isn't fair have all gone through this program as students. Some of us have been lucky enough to be on teams who have been successful from the start, and some of us from average or mediocre student run teams. We are taking what we learned from past experiences to make our current teams better. What we wish we had as high schools students- we are working our hearts out to provide for our own students.
In the end I think it boils down to the question "do you really have a problem with all these successful/resourceful teams and feel you're being cheated out of something, or do you actually have a problem with your own team and feel that you want to improve?"