Before I answer the aforementioned questions, I'd like to state that throughout my entire robotics career, I was mainly a part of film crew/documentation of the team. I did work on a fuel cell project, the Woodie Flowers Report, and the Chairman's Report. However, I was mainly working on video and pictures of the team, and now am doing the same thing with my new team.
I think a good way to get new people to join might include telling them that FIRST is not entirely engineering and building the robot (although that is obviously an extremely major role!), but that they can also do writing (Woodie Flowers Report, and Chairman's Report), animation, film crew, team outreach, etc. This way, you can get more people interested in what the team is all about, and when they come to a meeting, they can see how cool engineering really is!
1. I don't know if this counts as technology, but I'd like to believe it does. I'm going into photojournalism, which involves media technology. I had no idea that I even enjoyed taking photographs until I joined FIRST, and after a year on the team, I knew that photojournalism (taking pictures for news stories) was for me! FIRST definitely helped me in deciding what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
2. I am more interested in the application. To see all of these amazing teams come to competition with extremely different robots that employ many different mechanisms is truly inspiring! The application is what gives me a sense of awe, and soon after the application, I realize the amount of technology that goes into what everyone has created.
3. I'm not going into an engineering field, but I do hope that, as Dean Kamen says, the students from FIRST go on and do bigger and better things that help reshape the world. I have so much respect for science and technology after being in the program, and can't wait to see what the future will bring now that we have all these inspired teenagers!
4. Before joining robotics, I didn't really think that engineering was a possiblilty. While I'm not going into engineering, I can say that FIRST enabled me to see that anything is possible, as long as you set your mind to it. I know that if I were interested in animation, I could go into a career that employed animation. If I were interested in engineering, I could become an engineer. That's one of the amazing things about the FIRST program...there's a driving force behind each student, whispering "Yes you can, yes you can, yes you can."
I realize that I probably wasn't the best person to help out here, because I'm not going into engineering, but FIRST is for everyone, not just those interested in engineering. I'm hoping that this helped a little bit with recruiting. I think that if students knew more about all the options FIRST offers, they would be extremely excited to join.
Good luck!!!
