[Brandon Martus]

From the UFH folks:

Since this award started as a brainchild of a student on a team back in 2003, it grew to encompass FIRST in the best possible way – bringing forth positive examples of mentoring throughout our community. It served to show that the FIRST method of inspiring students worked both in and out of the classroom. Of course, it also highlighted some of the best and brightest minds in our program.

Our UFH Committee was honored to see that three of the last four Woodie Flowers Award winners had previously been UFH honorees. Potentially even more impressive is the fact that over 19 of our UFH honorees have been given the Woodie Flowers Finalist Award (approximately 1/3 of our winners). Many students have told us that the UFH nomination had given them extra practice on writing such an essay prior to submitting for the regional WFA.

With that in mind, we’ll be giving UFH a bit of a revamp. Although we still remain individual from the WFA, we’ll be working to create materials that will help you to write your essays for both awards. We’ll show you examples of past winning essays and give you tips and tricks on how to write clearly and effectively.

It would be, in a word, unfair not to bring back the Unsung FIRST Heroes Award. After all, even though we stopped honoring this award in December of 2006, since then we’ve received over 50 entries of students, teachers, and fellow mentors who have been nominated for this honor. We still have these on file and will consider them for future UFH honorees.

While it is not a mission of the FIRST programs to teach but to inspire, it is the UFH Committee’s mission to help teach you how to harness that inspiration and share it with the world. We know that each entry we read is a priceless token of your gratitude and enthusiasm.

Please watch for updates to the Unsung FIRST Heroes area of ChiefDelphi.com beginning early May, 2008. We’re excited for big things to come, and know you are too.

Thank you!