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Originally Posted by aztech75
unfortunently im not the best author so some of my points may sound a little bit gramatically off... but i think my point is clear...
More and more today I am seeing once great teams falling out of the FIRST Program because they just can't keep up with the rising cost. In the past seven years that i have praticipated in first I have seen a dramatic change in the way first is run.
The sad reality is that first isnt about kids anymore, its about makeing money for teams and trying to get the rest of the world interested in what we do. It is not a bad thing to promte engineering to kids, but they should be promoting what the kids have built, not who sponsors them or the fact that we can go to the georgia dome to compete. In the first years of first, the idea was for the kids to build a robot with the guidence of local engineers. But now it is the team with the bigger sponsor wins. There isnt even a true national Championship anymore. To get to a championship event you should qualify by being the best in a region not paying the entry fee.
Im not trying to bash FIRST, if it wasent for FIRST i would not have persued an engineering carrer. All i am trying to say is that instead of worrying about getting bigger and bigger, they should get back to their roots and see the reel reason we all are a part of first. TO LEARN about engineering.
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The sad truth is life is like an onion. You peel away layers to get to the center of it. The more you peel away the more it stinks and makes you cry.
Any organization suffers from warts. From our government, to organized religion to your local PTA or any robotics team. So why is that? Well mainly due to the human element. Not everyone is going to seek the same thing from any given element. There are people who are in FIRST to make a difference and there are people who are in FIRST for personal glory and people who joined FIRST just to pick up girls.
So FIRST isn't the rosy perfection that we FIRST thought it to be. Is anything in this world? Before all of you go flying off the handle and start talking craziness like outright quitting the program or something like that you find me something in this mad mad world that is perfect through and through and I'll follow you right out that door.