Quote:
Originally Posted by amesmich
Hello All,
I am a long time lurker first time poster. I am the mentor for rookie team 4638 http://northwestrobotics.org and we applied for the NASA grant but unfortunatly were not winners. My question, is there a way to find out why your team was not selected? Is there somethign we did wrong? Forgive me if I missed this somewhere but I did not find any inofrmation for possible reasons for not being selected. I only ask so we can better ourselves and adapt or adjust for next year. I am sure $6500 is a big chunk of change in anyones budget... well at least most. It certainly hurt us.
Thanks for any comments of feedback. |
To the best of my knowledge, NASA has never released any information concerning why a team wasn't selected. I could be wrong, but that's the most I know.
Every year there are many teams that are turned down that are surely qualified to receive funding, and it's a shame they don't. But there's only so much money to go around, and some teams unfortunately fall short.
I'm sure the folks over at NASA would like to fund your efforts as much as the next person - but they had a very limited number of grants to give out, and it just didn't work out.
As the coach of a team who received a NASA rookie grant last year and a second-year team grant this year, I can say that in our application last year we stressed the fact that our school had no STEM program (or any engineering core, class or anything period) and that we wanted to fill the void. This year we re-applied saying that our team has more than doubled in number and we're reaching more and more students thanks to NASA funding.
I'm inclined to think many big-name sponsorships for FRC teams are inclined to promote FIRST in communities where it's little or absent, and in schools where STEM or engineering don't take a front-and-center stage.
I could be wrong, but just my $0.02.
I wish you best of luck in acquiring funding and having a successful season - it's always unfortunate to see teams with financial problems :/
Let us know if you need anything at
www.eaglesrobotics.org though!