[Jon Stratis]

Define "to the exclusion of anything else"... When you invest a lot of time in a program like FIRST, you meet a lot of people and only interact with them in at FIRST events, on CD, and with FIRST teams. In those situations, it's only natural to spend most of your time talking about FIRST, and it's pretty easy to come away with the impression that the other person is more involved with FIRST than they are with anything else.

Given that, I can tell you that no one on our team (student or mentor) is so dedicated to the team that they exclude other things. We have students who miss most of the fall meetings due to sports. We have students who are part of the theater department or the debate team. Pretty much all of our students are heavily involved in at least one other activity at their school. As for the mentors, we rotate our "day off" so we can each maintain our other external commitments.

I will tell you, FIRST fulfills my desire to volunteer and give back to the community, and I don't do much of that outside of FIRST. On my day off each week, I play pool with some friends. Over the entire year, I probably spend more time playing pool than I do with FIRST (it helps that I have my own table). I doubt anyone at any of the FIRST event's I've met knows that, though... it's just not something that comes up in that atmosphere.