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Unread 03-06-2002, 15:01
ChrisH's Avatar Unsung FIRST Hero
ChrisH ChrisH is offline
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FRC #0330 (Beach 'Bots)
Team Role: Engineer
 
Join Date: Jun 2001
Rookie Year: 1998
Location: Hermosa Beach, CA
Posts: 1,230
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Quote:
It's really not about 6 weeks, or even 3 months anymore, is it?
If you think it is, you've missed the point. FIRST never really ends, the experience just changes like the year. That's why we talk about "build season" and "competition season". They are part of the rythm of life.

Some of us graduate from high school or college and move on to the "real" world of "real" jobs (meaning they pay you) and families. Others of us started in the real world and drift in and out of the FIRST world.

But if you really, really "get it" you never quite leave entirely.

That's why you spend two years looking over obscure, ancient books on mechanical solutions to figure out a new drive train, or how to finally make that software logic error free. Why you wake up in the middle of the night with the answer to a problem you don't have yet. Why you get out of your bath and run naked down the street shouting "Eureka!" when you solve a difficult problem. (Now you really know why they call it the Archemedies division, he is the oldest recorded FIRSTer)

FIRST is meant to address the entire being, to encourage you to develop a life style of questioning why things are the way they are and if they can't be made "better". We learn how to do this on relatively simple mechanical devices we call robots. But the methodology applies to all of life.

BTW these "simple" devices are more sophisticated than some of the space probes they were launching in my youth...

ChrisH
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Christopher H Husmann, PE

"Who is John Galt?"
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