To get overly lawyer-ese like so many of us do with rules...
Quote:
|
"Since its introduction in 2010, the FIRST Dean’s List Award has attracted the attention of prestigious colleges and universities who desire to recruit FIRST Dean’s List students"
|
This statement does NOT say that the students get in. Simply that the Award itself has attracted the attention of the colleges. Which in all reality probably means Dean has spoken with many of the prestigious colleges and they think the award is a great idea. Follow that up with this statement:
Quote:
|
Prestigious colleges have expressed great interest in meeting FIRST Dean’s List’s Award winners and so FIRST hopes that each team will take advantage of the opportunity to nominate their best students as FIRST Dean’s List Semi-Finalists!
|
And none of this is false. MIT, Yale, WPI and hosts more Admissions heads have come to speak at FIRST events, and are probably very interested in these students.
However, like so many say... do the math. Only TEN students are selected at the Championship level each year. There have only been FOUR years of the award... and I believe these last two years have only been Juniors (though many applied the "Juniors" concept early on). Thus only THREE classes of students (30 Championship level) even know if they have been admitted to schools. With only 30 kids... ~18,000 apply to MIT and less than 10% get in. Yale admits ~2,000 out of 30,000 applicants. So its really really tough to get in. And there are NO claims in any of the research or any of the speeches that this award guarantees admission.
And on another note, from seeing the students selected that I know... many have been team leaders, captains, co-captains, chairmans presenters, etc. BUT the leaders in the FIRST community may not be interested in going to Yale or MIT, or may not be exactly what those schools are looking for (I personally don't know any DL students with a 4.0+). Some are, but many aren't. Many students I know of choose schools like Clarkson, WPI, RPI, RIT, Carnegie Mellon, UMichigan, UIllinois, Harvey Mudd etc. All of these schools in my mind are VERY prestigious for excellent engineering programs, and don't have the same character as MIT or Yale. I have nothing against those schools, but when I chose to apply to schools, I did plenty of research on their programs, and even attended an MIT info session, and didn't end up even applying to either one as one of the 10 schools I applied to.
I don't think any single award can guarantee admission to any school (heck I saw a girl on my high school team get the full WPI scholarship at Champs way back in the day, but then not get admitted to the school!), as there are a whole host of factors that go into admissions.
I think FIRST wants to put a marketing spin on this awesome award, and I think this is the start to their spin. Like Dean has said I am AMAZED that it took them this long to come up with a student award... but I am excited that they have created something that will recognize student leaders and students that are likely to help grow the FIRST program... as we have seen (ok maybe this is a tad self serving) Alumni are one of THE best ways to grow the FIRST program, and one of THE best ways to promote great mentoring in the program (Take another quick aside - over 9 teams at the CT regional last year had Clarkson Alumni leading them or in significant mentorship roles!!).
Anyways, enough tangents. I'd love to see some detailed stats collected (like David suggested) on where all these Deans List students went & maybe even where they applied. I think there is a sizable FB group that maybe some data could be pulled from... and/or maybe FIRST has a way of collecting this info.