[Greg McKaskle]

Along with a few other engineers, I review FRC grant requests for NI funding. I also lead a team of engineers in doing the recruiting tasks at a major Texas university. The qualities that we value in FRC teams are amazingly similar to those we value in employees. This shouldn't be too surprising since we are essentially selecting a representative, one that you will make an investment in and hoping for some amount of accomplishment.

For an employee, no matter how good the grades or the list of accomplishments, they must be able to communicate and convince you that they can be a strong member of a team. This includes verbal, written, and body language and attitude. They don't have to be an actor or produce prose like Shakespeare, but negative impressions and miscommunication can be very costly in day-to-day operations. And of course the communication will largely be about technical topics -- descriptions of buggy mechanisms, observations that help to discover faults, descriptions of the plan that will make it is robust/fast/shiny. They also need to be able to describe the goals they initially set as well as their updates to those goals. You are looking at the whole package, and nobody is perfect, but your task as an interviewer/reviewer is to find ways to compare the expected contribution of each candidate and score or rank them.

For FRC teams, this hardly changes except that you aren't dealing with a specific individual, but an organization -- a team. The team's pit, signage, theme/message/attitude, the goals they set for themselves as an organization, and their accomplishments are all considered. Some of this comes from he written grant request, and some from previous encounters at events. Scoring lots of points or playing good D honestly isn't much of a factor for NI. Awards and positive impact on the students and community far outweigh a technically sophisticated robot or well-coached drivers.

It is also useful to think about a sponsorship request as a competition. Hundreds of teams are likely applying for the same thing as you, and you want your team merits to win your team the grant. This is similar to college applications and it happens within companies too -- for project funding, advancement, and winning contracts.

NI grants try to strike a balance between financial need, accomplishments, and locality. We do not want to see good teams fold. We want to see a good balance of mentor/student involvement. Local team sponsorship has the benefit of combining funds and direct engineer mentoring and it is highly visible and easier to measure results.

Finally, we have to weigh impact of the funds we give to a particular FRC team against the impact it would have on FLL or GirlStart, United Way or other charities. And at the end of the day, these funds could alternately be used to purchase faster computers, construct buildings, pay salaries of employees and interns; so we do have to justify how we are spending company money and why a particular FRC team's budget is more important than the other choices.

So, I'd encourage you to reconsider your initial conclusion. I suspect that this is based on a specific incident, and I doubt that the company motives are what you suggest. If your team was the one to lose funding and doesn't understand why, it is perfectly reasonable for the team to write a professional letter asking for more information, areas for improvement, etc. Be sure this is an official team letter and not a barrage of disorganized questions from different students or subteams. You may also consider sending a letter to companies who are still sponsoring, to tell them how your team did this season, how the money or time investment helped students and team, etc. Let them know how much this means to you and say thank you. This material helps a proponent of FIRST within the company to justify continuing and possibly enhancing the sponsorship.

Greg McKaskle