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What makes the great teams so great?
I think experience is key with fielding a great team. After a few years you now have some designs under your belt, you have an idea of the level of competition that you are likely to see. Above all you have a better understanding of the time constraints for this project. Teams after a few years also start to assemble the right people in the right places. Our first year many engineers joined and many students joined but only the dedicated stayed, the rest were never there in the long nights when we really needed them. Money? It is not everything, our robot was pretty complex but only cost us about 800-900 bucks to build outside of our own time. Many teams boast about how the engineers and mentors didn't help them they did it all themselves. I don't think thats the point of this, it's a team, both students and engineers have to work Together. When you accomplish that, I think you will find the result to be pretty impressive. We didn't win anything this year but I know everyone on the team feels great about building a competitive robot that didn't break. I like to win as much or more than the rest but that's enough for me.
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