[Brandon Holley]

Originally Posted by Cory

I've said this before, as have many others, but college FIRST is a bad idea.

You're going to take college students who are mentoring FRC teams, or might be mentoring FRC teams away and give them their own competition. There is no advantage to this. The point of the competition is to inspire, and college students have already been inspired. If they have not, they probably won't take part in the competition anyways.

The only thing it'd be doing would be to let college students relive the glory days of driving robots.

Cory is 100% correct here. I agree having a college level FIRST would just let college kids relive their glory days.

However, I must say that FIRST drops the ball when it comes to college students. Does something magical happen that summer between senior year of high school and freshman year of college? OF COURSE NOT! You don't come back after that summer with the knowledge and experience of an adult engineer. I know my team (125) has exactly 1 adult mentor, and he is our faculty advisor from Northeastern university. Other than that its all college kids. We're not always sure what we're doing, and we're not always sure that we're doing the right thing and being ideal role models. College kids have a much different FIRST experience than any other level of FIRST participant.

I think college kids should start to look upward. There are A LOT of other competitions where its perfectly fine for a college level student to be the "driver" or participant, and this doesn't mean you need to stop mentoring FIRST high schoolers.