Although I won't be a student on the team ever again I can't help but feel like I'm not finished yet. Waterloo is about 3 hours away from my high school so there will be difficulty with me mentoring the team next year... but I won't live with myself if I don't. I will always be kicking myself for waiting until my last year to join FIRST.
There was talk that the team might go under within a couple of seasons because the past four years it has held together by so few critical people, most of whom are graduating. But new people come every year, and the message of FIRST continues to grow throughout our community. Unfortunately, if you're outside of the GTA in Canada, like we are, it's fairly difficult to get a robotics team up and running. There are no experienced mentors, no engineers who have joined from other teams, and few large corporations able to sponsor teams. We only know what we have learned on our own.
I hear that next year the team even wants to try for the Chairman's award, which they have never done. I'm not sure why they never did before, but I think this was the first year that our school really learned what FIRST was about.
Perhaps our graduating students of 2005 are the ones who will spread FIRST much in the same way that Ian MacKenzie and Karthik did from Team 188. I can only hope
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