[Kims Robot]

See if you can find something that you can make your own. Something that you can take part in, which may not have to be a group effort. Perhaps you can work on making the decorations for the robot, or build up the control system, or make the team posters, or something like that.

I think all the suggestions above are good ones, except I dont agree that in this case "work is work". FIRST should be fun, it should be something we enjoy doing. All of us have our days (I definitely have this season!) where we just wish the day would be over or the task would end, or the robot would disappear. But inevitably we come back the next day and something good comes along, a reason to finish this very daunting task.

I would say dont give up yet. Try and see if you can get in touch with someone on your team. Maybe not everyone will accept you, but if you are a student, find a mentor you can relate to, ask them if you can give them a hand. Try to find something that you have in common with someone on your team.

FIRST is a huge lesson in learning to work with other people. At your job, you get paid to learn to work with people. They even give seminars on "dealing with difficult people". There are a lot of engineers who just hole themselves up a cube and work on their little project, and are often very brilliant, but just dont work well with others.

In FIRST, we are all volunteers, even students. No one HAS to be there. So the hardest job for the team leaders is to make everyone feel useful, and included. With your team, if it is an older one, they may be set in their ways, and you may be new, so perhaps are being overlooked. Or maybe your team is big, and its hard to get everyone involved. But there is always somewhere you can be useful, and something that you could do for the team. See if you can figure out what that is. Talk to your team leader when there arent many people around. Even if you dont want to talk about feeling excluded, just ask them what you can do. Or try and come up with an idea, and ask them if you can work on it.

Once you find something that you can do for the team, they will see you as useful, and it will help you get over that not being liked feeling. If you are a high schooler, high school is rough. FIRST is not always different. Groups of friends join, and if you arent part of a group, it may be difficult to join them.

Good luck, and stick it through, at least for this season. You will likely have a good chance to bond with your teammates on travel, or within the next week, when everyone is going crazy trying to get everything done. FIRST team members and even members of other teams have been some the best friends I have ever made.