[Kris Verdeyen]

This is an interesting issue. Modern breweries are highly automated, requiring electrical, mechanical, chemical, and industrial engineers to be on staff. There is nothing inherently immoral about those engineers doing their job, nor is there anything wrong with them wanting to influence young people to become engineers themselves.

It is immoral, however, for a beer company to advertise to high school students, and to utilize an ostensibly educational activity to do so is doubly immoral. Tough call. I'd say that if Budweiser wanted to sponsor a team, they'd probably want to name the team after the high school, and not put a big "Bud Light" sign in their pit.

There's also another issue. If we as a FIRST community honestly feel like drinking alcohol is wrong (for the record, I don't think this), it is immoral for us to take their money.

This is a very touchy issue in a larger sense, as well. Corporations exist for the sole purpose of making money. The vision of the Microsoft corporation might be "a computer on every desktop", but if that goal were reached tomorrow, would Microsoft close up shop, and pat themselves on the back for a job well done? It's doubtful. The point is not that businesses are in business to make money, we all know that, it's that every corporation has skeletons in its closet. As a close-to-home example, my team was partially sponsored (until recently) by Lockheed-Martin, and I'll bet that a higher percentage of the end users (the pointy-end users) of L-M products were killed by them than were the end users of Budweiser products, and those were the ones that worked!

The point of this program is to show young people that engineering is a way to do something useful to the world, interesting to yourself, and able to give a yourself a good living to boot. The engineers at L-M who make ICBMs do make something useful to the world, as do the ones at Ford that make smog-belching cars, the ones at Monsanto that make genetically modified corn, and the ones at Budweiser who make adult beverages.

This is a complex issue, and I hope that it doesn't just get a knee-jerk response (either way).