[Allison]

I'm not a highschool student anymore. But I will give you my take on things from the college student side.

The balance between school and FIRST can be a difficult one. I know for me I tend to go all the way or don't do it. It led me to a lot of great friends, the starting of a new award winning first team, and even recieved the WFA in St. Louis this past year. To everyone around me it looked like I have a great handle on time but ask the kids on 1747 they get email from me at 4:30am cause I was just finishing my homework and need to go something for FIRST before class the next day. This led me to be a very over stressed person who was making mistakes. When I noticed this was starting to happen I changed my way of doing things, on the night before an exam I would not attend robotics meeting or if I was the only one with a car for the night I would open the meeting then retreat to a corner to do homework. On our team it was a frequent sight to see 5 or 6 kids with textbooks out and would split the meeting in two working for a while on the robot then going to homework. I personally see no issue with doing homework at a meeting and hey there are 8 college kids to help with your math if you get stuck.

I made the hard decision after IRI this year that atleast for now school and my health must come first. Both of these thing suffered greatly because I over did it with FIRST. So for this year I am no longer working with a team, I may help out at a regional in my schedule allows next semester. I still help out 1747 but if I get an email and something else is going on I finish that instead of making FIRST priority number one. That is the key FIRST, I didn't remove FIRST completely but moved it to position number 3 or 4 in my life.

I guess my biggest piece of advice is yes FIRST is awesome but finding ways to back off cause even too much of a good thing is bad. Make a schedule and block out time for homework and time for FIRST. This was the biggest thing that helped me was I made rules...i.e. no robots the night before an exam.

In the end your education is key if you love engineering or whatever you want to do someday. a night away from the robot to get an A on an exam to get into the college of your dreams is worth it.

~Allison