[neilsonster]

That's a great learning experience you've been given, congrats! I haven't exactly been able to apply my knowedge gained from robotics in such a direct way as you have, but I can credit FIRST with my first co-op employment in a similar mannar:

I'm in my first year of Computer Science at U of Waterloo and I had absolutely no trouble getting a co-op job for my first work term (I got 11 interviews over two weeks... the only reason I didn't do more is that's how long the interview period lasted before we ranked our potential employers) during the early job-matching period of this term. I credit this fortunate situation I was put in *entirely* to my time spent on robotics in high school and today as a mentor.

After creating my resume I looked at the section I had created specially for my experiences with FIRST I realized it was by far the strongest part of my resume, and that I had gained some extremely important life skills over the past couple years. Aside from being asked, "so why do you want to work for <insert company here>?" the most common question I had in interviews was "So... you were on a robotics team? Could you tell me a little about it?" I was also able to easily answer (with many examples) those somewhat typical (and vague) questions asked in interviews along the lines of "have you ever been in a team situation where...". I can't say I would have even received an interview in the early match process if I had never joined the robotics team in high school.

Every student, be it elementary school, high school, or university, (and even those older folks too I suppose...) still involved with FIRST would do well to stick with it as long as possible (well as long as you're enjoying it still), because there will always be more to learn, and you *will* benefit from it!

Anyways.. that's about it! Now if I could only stop thinking about the Waterloo regional and focus on this homework...