[Anupam Goli]

I don't understand why you particularly think that Dean's List is meant to be an award to peddle to colleges. I think the original intent was to recognize special individuals in the FIRST community, sort of like the All-Stars of FIRST. Just because someone has spent a lot of time and effort into FIRST does not equate to the required attitude, personality, and dedication needed for certain institutes.

I currently attend college at Georgia Tech, one of the top engineering universities in the world (ranked 6th I think?), after being denied from CalTech and Carnegie Mellon. I was really sad and mad when the decisions came in, seeing my classmates who wrote FIRST in their application but only showed up once or twice a week get into MIT and CalTech, or leaders who were never interested in improving or winning, and only saw robotics as some club getting all of these leadership scholarships and getting accepted into places like Stanford and Yale. College admissions are really a black box. You don't know what the others put on their application to get them into the institute, and you never know if your application viewer knows how important FIRST is or not. It's really unfortunate that arbitrary test scores and academic grades are the only constants that can measure the caliber of a student (quite poorly though), but it's not the end of the world if your son didn't get into MIT or Yale.

People have said this before, and now that I'm in college, I'll say it now. The only benefit of going to MIT over Georgia Tech in my case, would've been learning to pay off thousands of dollars in debt and bragging rights of going to the #1 school in ECE rather than the #5 school. The education is the same. I have friends who LEARN LESS in their first 2 years at MIT than their first 2 years at Georgia Tech. Does it really matter that your son won't get to say he went to the #1 institute? Even if it gets him a better paying job, he still has to pay off the massive student loans that an institute like MIT makes you take to pay off their tuition. It's not the end of the world. Know that just because you do FIRST, you aren't going to get into MIT. However, know that because you do FIRST, you will have an engineering background that will make you succeed no matter where you go.