[patrickrd]

Cornell is also involved with FIRST, but it has nothing to do with the curriculum. FIRST at Cornell is centered around what has evolved over 4 years to be a student club, receiving funding from the university each year. The Cornell FIRST Robotics club then takes that money, and uses it to help promote FIRST in the community. Four years ago, we started our first high school team. Last year, we began a lego team. Next year, we plan to get multiple lego league teams going. We are also planning to start a new high school team in the area each of the next two years. The purpose of the Cornell FIRST Robotics Club is no longer to sponsor and mentor a single team, but rather to promote FIRST throughout the surrounding communities, help them get teams started, and help them become self-sustaining.

We decided this was the best approach for our organization, given the time and resources that busy college students have. During the build season, we do not have time to mentor high school students daily, but rather once or twice per week. Given that engineers can be found in the community that can help out daily, we find that college students do not make the an ideal mentor. Further, college students have less knowledge and technical experience than engineering mentors. Although having college students as mentors can certainly be better than nothing, we have found that our time and energy can better help FIRST (and correspondingly, reach out to more students) by spreading FIRST around the community, using our University as a resource for achieving this goal.