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Unread 17-11-2003, 21:05
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Re: Skewed Perspective

Quote:
Originally posted by Aaron Lussier
I've thought long and hard about how I should word this thread without Offending anybody, so here I go.

I am a three year veteran of Team 151, the Wildcards. During my time on the team I learned more than I could have possibly Imagined. However I am afraid that FIRST gave me a skewed perspective of Engineering. I am not saying that the six weeks of build time was not the best time of my life, because it was. I'm talking about how I, myself was exposed to the world of engineering. I interpreted it as a fun, but Stressful, Hard working, but big rewarding program. However after three years of FIRST, I though Engineering was what I wanted to do with my life, even with my lack of math skills. I am now in my First Semester of College at Wentworth Institute of Technology, and have been have serious doubts about even graduating with an Associates. I've made the decision to not return next semester, and pursue something that is more along my alley, Video Production. I digress, My question to all of you is this:


Does FIRST give a skewed perspective of Engineering?


I am requesting a civil argument about this because I'm sure there are people on Both sides. Thank you for reading and commence the argument.
OK I have not been here in a while and I think will go ahead and give my oppion on this. For me FIRST was one of the few things that I did in high school that did prepare me for college. The jump from high school to college was the biggest one I ever had to take. Like many people said I was an outstanding student in high school, then I went to college and it was filled with outstanding students. It took me a whole semester just to figure out to deal with the whole college situation. In high school, I was lucky if even studied for a test the night before. Now in college I start studying for a test the day after the last one is over.

I went threw the exact same thing that Aaron is going threw the first semester of my second year. I had this Calc 3 class that was by far the lowlight of my time at college. I had serious thought of never being able to pass that class, but I stuck with it and threw a lot of hard work and long nights I somehow passed with a C. While I do think it was the worst class I ever took, its was also the best thing for me at that time. I now know that if I passed that class there is no class that I can't pass.

Like Raul said, it is really discouraging getting that test back with a 45% on the top of it, but then you see the grade distribution and realize that a 45% is the 5th highest grade in the class. And the point about weed out classes hits the nail right on the head. They are put in the program for exactly that, to get people that aren't totally interested and willing to put ridiculous amounts of time out of the program.

Back to FIRST. In my sophmore design class I finally realized the value that FIRST had. The class consisted of about 60 students from all of the engineering majors. We were broken up into 3 multiple disciplinary teams and given our asignment. We were told that we need to, design, build, and test a robot to go threw the sewer system and to take video of the inside of the pipes. We were also told we had about 2 months to do it. (sound firmiliar to anyone yet?) As the class progressed I was amazed at how closely it followed FIRST. I always felt one step ahead of everyone else in the class because I had already been threw basically the same situation 3 times.

Needless to say you can guess which teams robot stole the show on demo day. I have FIRST and a lot of hard work from my team to thank for that.

FIRST and everyone involved in it totally changed my outlook on engineering and I know I owe the program a ton for that.
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