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Originally Posted by Wendy Holladay
All FRC awards should promote students, teams, and FIRST.
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To make that a stated goal seems disingenuous to me. Giving an award to someone to promote yourself? Obviously it has precedence -- Alfred Nobel started the Nobel Prizes to clear his name as the inventor of dynamite, but that doesn't make it right. To me, it changes the message from "Wow! You're pretty great!" to "Wow, you're pretty great and you'll make a fantastic billboard for our program!" Inspiration is not even close to a zero sum game, but sometimes I am not convinced FIRST feels the same way.
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Originally Posted by Libby K
The Dean's List Award is to celebrate outstanding leadership.
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Originally Posted by "Dean's List Criteria
While FIRST judges will consider any student nominated by their team as a FIRST Dean’s List Semi-Finalist, this year judges will give preference to students in their junior year when they make their selections to maximize the impact of the FIRST Dean’s List Award for students and colleges/universities supporting FIRST.”
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I don't think exemplary leadership requires wanting a college education. Many of the key people on my high school FRC team didn't go to college. By the sounds of this, if they don't plan on going to college are they not as highly considered? A fairly significant number of my mentors and friends growing up didn't go to college and are still really great people making a real impact on the world. They can still be community and workplace leaders. College worked out pretty well for me, but I totally get and respect people who don't do college. As a sidenote, I have seen many an engineering college student disrespect a mechanic and promptly get severely shown up.
And to be honest I think one of the problems is that so many people are so concerned about going to a prestigious school. I paid a lot of money to go to one. I got a really good education, made a bunch of great friends, acquired a relatively modest mountain of debt, and when I graduated I got a job that I'm really excited to get up for in the morning.
But, I had many friends go to not prestigious schools, and they still got a really good education, a bunch of great friends, and jobs they are also really excited to get up for in the morning.
College isn't a destination -- it's just a stop along the way for some. As long as your school is accredited chances are you can find like minded people and do really cool independent projects that will impress your future employers a heck of a lot more than even the most challenging class you could take at MIT. (Worth noting that MIT kids tend to have awesome independent projects)
I really liked FIRST because we drew upon a wide variety of people. Our technical mentors included a commercial fisherman, a factory manager, a postmaster, a (boat) pilot, a retired engineer who worked rewiring Apollo after the Apollo 1 fire, another retired engineer who built a hydro power plant in a big stream on his property to keep himself entertained, a landscaper, and a long list of others. We had students from honors/AP, and kids who were on the technical track and spent all their time at the vocational school. And we got along great, and we were all a lot better off for it.
To cast that off and focus an award on the college bound is a misstep I think. I would hate to see the Dean's list become just another award kids strive for to look good on college applications (not that this is currently the case). Because the real secret to looking great on college applications is not caring about college applications and just being awesome. As Don says, that is just my opinion.
As a sidenote, I think Barry's situation is an interesting brainteaser, but extremely unlikely to actually happen. In the real world I do not think you will ever have a case where 6 students are exactly matched in terms of everything except where they want to go to school. In my mind, if their leadership qualities and experiences are exactly matched then they all deserve the award an equal amount, regardless of what they want to do in the future. It'd be a pretty crowded stage.
I am sure some of you will disagree with me, looking forward to the discourse.
