Since you're in FIRST, you have the five licenses off of FIRSTbase. If you don't, consider buying a student license for a year. It will be very beneficial.
If you really want to learn 3ds max then: any chance you get, animate. There is a load of useful websites out there. Some of these can be found on the resources page of my own tutorial
here. Something I did to learn was make an animation over the summer: from start to finish. I also learned a lot under our amazing leader, Kevin, last year.