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Re: To go to Championships...or not....
For the past three years, the date of Battlecry@WPI has been around the time of AP exams (either the weekend before or between AP exam weeks, I believe). It's a great event and my team loved attending it when these events did not conflict, but we decided it was not feasible for our team to attend on the years it did conflict. Maybe it's not quite the same as the Championship, but don't feel that you need to go to the Championship if it's going to put undue stress on your students and/or your mentors. Their academic habits and successes are important to their futures.
While the AP exams are a big deal, the thing that worries me even more is that the mentors also have their college final exams. (I'm also shocked that they're the first week of May- ours are always the third or fourth week of May.) Between robotics and math team competitions, I missed a lot of school in high school during the spring, but it was no big deal. I was a motivated student and I stayed on top of the work fairly easily. College is a different story- I work even harder, but missing even one day of classes can be detrimental to understanding the material in that class, and professors are not as easy going about making work up. (Example: Last fall I missed one day of a lab class while representing MIT at the SWE National Conference, and my professor refused to let me make up the work because I "was not taking school seriously by putting my extracurriculars first". (Side note: I disagree with her about this; I think in the long run my interactions that day with women practicing engineering will be more valuable than the four hours I would have spent in that lab class.)) Maybe not everyone is like me; maybe your mentors are superheros at succeeding in their college courses and have no problem missing classes, or maybe their professors are more lenient in allowing make-up work or rescheduling exams. Still, I think missing two or three days of classes the week before your final exams is nothing to laugh at. The Championship is great, and I really wish I could have been there for the past two years, but I know I made the right decision for me by going to class and watching the webcast on Friday afternoon and Saturday after class. You have to make the right decision for your whole team, with the input of your whole team. Maybe you can do it this year, maybe you can't.
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Ellen McIsaac
Team 1124 ÜberBots 2005-2015
Team 5012 Gryffingear 2015+
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