[Luckyfish05]

How did I get involved in FIRST? Well... Let me share...

First off, you have to understand. My parents are engineers, my grandfathers were engineers, my uncle is an engineers, and many of my guy friends are engineers. Oh yea, my brother's a physics major. Needless to say, me being me, I was bound and determine NOT to be an ENGINEER!

It was my senior year of high school, and my friends (most of them) had been involved for years. I, being a swimmer, didn't see the point of getting involved. I heard robotics competition, and thought what I'm sure most people think that don't know about FIRST, bunch of "geeks" tinkering over these machines and nothing exciting.

Well, then came physics class. I was stuck in a class of everyone being involved in PantherTech except for me and one other person. Physics was actually PantherTech with physics on the side. Watching match videos, getting on CD, and talking about robots, and thunderchickens and who knows what else. Then, all of my friends really started to push to get me to travel with them (I think for some reason that if I went the cost for everyone went down), and I caved.

First competition, music, triple-play matches with the Beast, meeting new people, dancing, and seeing GP in action....

Long story short.... I now bleed FIRST instead of blood. Joined for friends, and five years later, of those friends there are just two of us are still involved. I'm sure no one believed I would be one of those when I started five years ago.