Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Adam Y.
Your numbers are probably skewed. I really doubt that the population of Long Island is that evenly distrubuted. In fact it can't be. The majority of people probably reside closer to Nassau than Suffolk.
That mainly relates to the fact that everything in Long Island is twice as expensive as it is in Ponca City. It's proximity to the city makes it the prime place for every single bussiness to rip everyone off. Also the only major company (Lockhead Martin??) on Long Island is sponsoring all of the teams last I knew.
|
You're correct, the population isn't that evenly distributed. Suffolk county is less densely populated than Nassau. It has 1.3 million people in just 287 sq. mi. So a team would only have to cover 28.7 sq. mi. instead of 90 something. Also, a $70K salary in Suffolk is about equivalent to a $40K salary in a Ponca City kinda of area. (Suffolk, NY --> Altus, OK via salary.com) So people in Suffolk are making about 33% more than those in Ponca City, relatively.
Also, I am well aware that FIRST has many success stories among rural and inner-city teams. An important point to remember if that we mostly hear just from the success stories. We hear from the Ponca City and Grundy teams that work their tails off each year to get enough funding to compete and succeed at it. We don't typically hear from teams that can't raise enough funds or the teams that aren't formed at all because there isn't $10K of funding in their area.
Finally, to those of you that have team members pay for travel expenses, fundraise, etc, if that's what it takes for your team to make it and your team is okay with that, then that's great. My team thinks that our purpose is to inspire the students and community to be interested in science and engineering. We don't think that sending students door to door to raise funding is a good way to do this, nor is it conducive to our students schoolwork. Our main sponsor is very interested in the welfare of our students, and would actually be upset if we had then doing major amounts of fundraising or if they had to pay their way to a competition. That's our philosophy, and that's where my arguments are coming from.