Quote:
Originally Posted by EricH
Now, why limit yourself to robotics competitions? Sure, you know them quite well. But you're also depriving yourself of the opportunity to grow in another direction. I've been on the SAE Aero Design team for 5 years now, but my senior design project is the NASA Lunabotics competition. (Aren, if you're going to that competition, we should meet up sometime.) I've learned a lot about teaming, flight, crashing (  ), and dealing with (lack of) success from the Aero team that I really don't think I picked up in FRC.
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Glad to hear you say that. I would have, but you beat me to it.
Robotics is great (I am sure everyone can agree on that) but there are also a lot of other engineering challenges out there. In addition to the points you made, it is can be very expensive and require a large variety of skills to help put together a quality robotics program. It is sometimes easier for a smaller school to fund and staff some more focused competitions than robotics. A collage with a very strong mechanical engineering program but a limited software or electronics program might find a different kind of competition fits their focus better. I hope I do not offend anyone too much here, but in my opinion, there is at least some chance, robotics may not the be the absolute be all and end all of all engineering achievement.