[logank013]

Originally Posted by DaveL

Does aiming to be a team and being more restrictive from the beginning help you compete and be able to deliver a more technical student education?

I would like to learn if other teams have had these issues, how they improved and how they would rate themselves on a club / team dimension.
Dave

I feel like aiming to be a team is helpful. Being more of a team focuses High School kids seeing how important robotics is to their lives and how much of a time commitment it takes to be on the robotics team. Each year, we do many things for a team that a club wouldn't do.

First, we all have to go through a "job interview" situation. Everyone makes a resume. New members answer short answer questions. Returning members write a paper based on a prompt. Everyone then brings their resume and paper to a 10 minute "job interview" and dresses up to meet with our teacher sponsor, main mentor, and another mentor for a 3 on 1 interview.

Another thing each team member has to do is raise $600 in sponsors. We usually have a couple of months to raise our sponsors or "investors" before dues are due.

Because of these two main things, we have a fairly strict team. This year, we had around 50 kids interview for a spot on the team, we accepted around 35-40 members to the team. By the time build season rolls around, I project we will have around 25-30 members. All the members on our team tend to invest a lot of their time into robotics. Going through a job interview and raising $600 is a lot to do for just a club. It helps members take robotics more seriously.

Many times, I wish that some of our team members were more involved in the team, but then I remember our members are more involved than in many other teams. This process is sort of a pain, but it is what makes our team what it is. I love FIRST but raising $600 is hard. But if we didn't have to do that, we would have a lot of team members that wouldn't care and would treat our team more like a club. It helps lead to our success. I feel like this hard process is part of what made our team so successful in 2015

I hope this helped you. PM me or respond in the thread if you have any more questions about how our team works. Thanks for reading.