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Re: Future First Championship News
I was involved with FRC for three years and am now a first year mentor. My team was started in 2013 and up until this year, my team has never qualified for worlds. In 2013, I was named a Dean's List finalists and traveled to worlds with my mom and two of my mentors. The experience of walking around the pits and meeting teams from all over the world inspired me to do everything I could to get my team there one day to experience the energy and atmosphere that is unique to the world championships. When I returned home from St. Louis, I was beyond excited to get a start preparing the team for the future year's competition, but was disappointed when my team was not as enthusiastic as I was. Going into the 2014 season, my team went through some major challenges including losing our work space and being kept from our shop for over a week due to snow. Almost half of our team were seniors and most of them had "seniority" and barely showed up. Our team turned into a small group of dedicated students who spend every waking hour working on robotics. To keep us motivated, we would often live stream other regionals while we worked, in particular waterloo. I remember seeing how excited the other kids on my team were to see teams such as 254 and 1114 compete, and I remember how excited I was when I was able to tell them that I had met students from the teams at worlds and gotten to see their past robots in person. Fast forward to this year. I am now in college but have come back to mentor my team, particularly in outreach with the goal of winning EI or RCA. Most of the students I was working with on the team had never watched a chairmans video or heard of any of the big teams, so I gave them the assignment of watching the HoF chairmans videos from the past several years. Just this task alone got them inspired to work their butts off when they realized that for the past 13 years, our team has been doing the same things as some of these teams and our team could actually win an award. And they did. My kids won the EI award at the Peachtree regional and were invited to worlds for the first time in our team's history. I have never seen my team so excited because all of their work paid off and they earned a spot at worlds instead of just piggybacking off of another team or getting a wildcard spot. Since finding out that they are going to worlds, all they can talk about is how excited they are to meet the big teams and possibly get to play with them. I know for a fact that one of the guys on the team will full on fangirl if he gets the chance to meet 254, and quite honestly, nothing makes me more proud. I know that the experience of getting to be at worlds with all of the teams that they look up to will help my team be inspired to continue doing well and push themselves. My fear with the spilt of worlds into two championships is many more teams will be able to qualify for worlds without earning it, and will be less inspired to work harder next year if they know that they can just slide by and still make it. Also, every team has those couple of teams that they idolize, and getting to meet them is basically like meeting a celebrity. If there are two championships, teams may never get to meet their idols and compete with them which makes them less motivated to get to worlds in the future. I'm sorry for how long this post is but FIRST really did shape me into who I am today and I want future students to be able to get the experience that I got out of it!
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Kristin Weiss
4468 Alumni and Mentor
Student 2013: Peachtree RI // Peachtree DLF
Mentor 2015: Peachtree Finalist // Peachtree REI // 2016: PCH Columbus Winner // PCH Kennesaw DEI // PCH DCEI
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