Hi Kartik. Nice letter. I agree with Beth, print it on paper and stick it in an envelope. Email is much to easier to ignore and delete.
I'm pretty sure I could write a "better" letter than yours, but it would sound like an adult marketing guy wrote it which is NOT what you are looking for. There are a couple of small changes you could make to add to its professionalism without hurting the student-written flavor. I've pasted a slightly modified version below, and included some comments in [brackets].
I am Kartik Singla, a grade 12 student from Waterloo Collegiate Institute. We would like to ask for your assistance to help us participate in the FIRST Robotics program's 2005-2006 season. [I like the fact that you tell them what you want up front. A lot of times amateurs will bury this at the bottom of the letter – which is a part of the letter that they won’t read if you don’t catch their attention up here.] This competition is a great way for your company to get involved in the community. Our school has been participating in it for two years now [Generally speaking, write out numbers less than ten, and use numerals for bigger numbers. An exception is when the small number is part of a range which includes a bigger number, such as “rainfall ranges from 5 to 20cm per month.”] Over 50 students at WCI have participated in FIRST, and 19 have already gone on to study science and engineering in college. Many of these earned scholarships through the FIRST program and were able to attend colleges that might otherwise have been out of their reach. [Make sure you include something specific about what FIRST does for you and your school. PR people think in anecdotes. Give them a good story.]
[The reader needs to learn a little bit about FIRST. Check usfirst.org for some standard language. They won’t mind if you steal it. How about this instead?] FIRST means “For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology." In 2005, over 30,000 [check number] students and adult volunteers participated in about 1,000 FIRST teams around the world. Most are in Canada and the USA, but there are also teams from such far flung locations as Brazil, the UK, and Israel. These teams compete at 30 regional tournaments each spring, and the top teams are invited to a world championship in April. There are currently two regional tournaments held each year in Canada– Toronto and Waterloo. The Waterloo regional was started this year with the efforts of University of Waterloo and major corporations such as X, Y and Z.
Our team participated in both Canadian regional tournaments this year. The robot was built entirely at the University of Waterloo by twelve [an exception to our rule about numbers – since most of the numbers in this sentences are small, we demoted “12” to a small number. English is a tricky language] WCI students with the help of three UW undergraduate engineering students, one UW graduate student, one Engineering professor, one WLU student and one *** employee. We were supported by companies like *****,***,****,****,*****,****. This has truly been a community project and we would like to get more community involved. We wish to participate in both regionals again for our 2005-2006 season. We ask for the support of your corporation to help us continue our growth this year.
[Your ending can be improved. Don’t be afraid to ask for what you want. How about
: We are meeting with corporate and community leaders to present our plans for next year, and to ask for support of many kinds – not just financial. We would like to meet with you next week. You can contact me via email at
xxxxxx@yyyy.com, or call me at 123-456-7890. In any event, I will be contacting you soon.] Please reply back to this email if you would like further information, or set up a meeting to discuss about our team and the competition.
Thanks
[I would use a formal business closing like "Yours Truly".]
Kartik Singla
Public Relations Captain
Team 1385- Gear Vikings!
“FIRST is not about people building robots, it’s about Robots building people”
[How about this quote instead.]
"...to create a world where science and technology are celebrated... where young people dream of becoming science and technology heroes..." - Dean Kamen, FIRST Founder