[RyanJK]

Hi everyone!

I truly believe that a college level FIRST program will work. From the funding aspect, Alex Miller made a good point by bringing up a universities student activity fee. Most schools collect a fee from all students to fund student programs, and the amount of money these funds hold is usually quite immense. I now attend the Illinois Institute of Technology and am a member of the Illinois Tech Robotics group. We receive most of our funds from IIT's student activity fund. That being said, we also get a lot of money from local businesses and companies. I believe that a group of students would be able to take part in this college level FIRST competition because we at Illinois Tech Robotics do so many different things with the money we receive (we enter 3 robots in the JSDC competition, run educational workshops open to the community, host the IL FRC and FTC kickoffs, host the IL FTC championship, open our workshop up to local teams, are building a robotic exoskeleton, building a swarm of Roombas that communicate with each other, helping design the college FIRST pilot, and working on prototype robots for the pilot), I think it would be possible to take part in the college pilot with little money from your school, or money solely from sponsors. Also, look at FRC. There are multiple teams (the team I was in was one of them) that run without a dime from their school and get all their money from sponsors. If an FRC team could do it, I think a team at the college level could do so as well.

As for someone being able to have the time to commit to this, I can't really comment. I don't know everyone's schedule, course load, etc. But I can say that at IIT, we have a robotics club with 30+ members who do feel they have the time for something like this. And I think that you will see the same at any college you look at.