college counseling decides to help us... good or bad?

[Kristina]

I personally don't think you'll have to worry about people there being for the scholarship money since most people know that you have to be highly involved to get a scholarship and you can't just get one by joining. If anything, you might have to worry about people joining just to boost their college applications.

You can never really judge people on what you think their motives are. I'm sure some people thought that I joined robotics for my college application since I was involved in everything else at school too but hey, I like keeping busy and organizing the team was something that I thought was fun, especially since so many of my friends were on the team. Not to sound cocky, but if I was turned down because I didn't seem all "hard-core...yeah, let's build stuff" the team would have lost a valuable asset since I was there every day for hours and helped in my own way immesnsely.

I think as long as you make it clear how much time you're expecting people to devote to FIRST and hold them accountable to that, than it should be fine. And even if someone entered for the wrong motives, if they're working there everyday then you could really change a person's point of view and they could become really passionate too.