[Alexa Stott]

From my experience, it's rather dependent on the judges. When we submitted at UTC in 2007, the format was very formal and the judges mostly asked about specific team initiatives. Since we were not submitting at our home regional, they asked us why we submitted in CT/how we have impacted that region. That was definitely a question we were not prepared for. I'm not sure if this is a common experience, as I know numerous teams have submitted (and won!) at events that were not their home events.

When we submitted at Hawaii in 2008, the interview was much more conversational, so the judges just sort of asked things to expand on or clarify things as we went through our presentation (they deviated from the 5 min of presentation and 5 min of questions format). The judges did ask us a few personal questions; we had one senior in the interview with us, so they asked him specifically about his plans for after HS and how FIRST influenced him and such.

The best advice I could give is to make sure you bring plenty supplemental materials with you to give to the judges. There's probably going to be a lot of stuff you don't get to get into or talk about in your interview, essay, or video. Probably the nicest one we've submitted was a portfolio of our team back in 2006, which contained team history, articles/stories from alumni, sections on community outreach, our FIRST RINOS program, testimonials/recommendations from other teams that we'd helped along the way, etc.