Is FIRST Worth It?

[SlaminSwimster]

Hi Everyone,
My name is Tessa Wiegand and I'm an alumni of team 2614, MARS. I graduated from high school in 2011 and am currently finishing up my freshman year in college. After my team won it's first Chairman's Award this past Saturday, I sat down and tried to write something that summed up what FIRST has become for me in the past year. I'm not a usual Chief Delphi poster, but after sharing this with a teammate of mine, he highly suggested that I also share it with the FIRST community. I hope that the "essay" below will serve as reminder about the impact that FIRST has and that my feelings are something that many of you might share.
FIRST love,
Tessa

"Is FIRST Worth It?
Sometimes you wonder if FIRST is worth it. It’s on those nights at 3am when the robot just twitches instead of running autonomous code. It’s the days when your friends say come hang out, but you can’t because there’s a pile of homework waiting for you after robotics practice. It’s the days when you see your teammates making life mistakes despite the influence of your team. It’s then that you wonder if the at least 2500 hours you physically spend at robotics practice and the countless hours you spend working on FIRST related stuff in a 4 year span are worth it. After all it seems like that that many hours of robotics should be something greater than a high school extracurricular. Shouldn’t it be life changing or something?

I left high school thinking that though FIRST had been an incredible experience, it had been just an experience. It was a part of my life that had begun January 3, 2008 and had ended when I boarded the plane for college. Now, though, as I finish up my second semester of college I wonder if that’s actually true. Recently several things have showed me that FIRST may run more deeply in my veins than I thought.

Even though I wrote one of my college admissions essay about changing West Virginia’s educational culture through FIRST robotics and the other essay started out with me playing basketball against robots and I applied to college as an engineering major, when I got to college I ran about as far away from engineering as I could. I told myself that even on my FIRST team I had mostly done outreach, so why was I bothering with engineering? My freshman schedule was filled with social sciences until one day randomly I saw a sign advertising an introduction to engineering sciences class. I still couldn’t tell you why I decided to take the class. There was no logical decision process and really no reason at all, but I enrolled anyway. I made it through the biomedical part of the course with indifference. It was an interesting subject, but I had known all along that biology wasn’t my favorite.

I went home for spring break still thinking I’d be a social sciences major, but then I went to my FIRST team’s regional in Pittsburgh. It was while I sat in the stands surrounded by all of my friends from robotics who had also come back as alumni to watch, that I realized just how much I missed FIRST. I realized that the vast majority of high school friends I still stayed in touch with in college were friends from robotics. I realized that every parent in the stands still cared about how I was holding up even though I now lived 12 hours away, and that my mentors were still like second parents even from 616 miles away. Maybe more importantly, though, I realized that I didn’t want to grow up and leave FIRST behind.

Nearly a year after my high school graduation, I don’t think about my high school varsity basketball team very much and my experience on student council hardly ever crosses my mind. A year later, I forget who the Honor Girl and Boy of my senior class were and who won homecoming queen, but FIRST is still there. Sure I have a picture of my team above my desk and my brother (still on the team) keeps me updated on my team’s progress, but it’s so much more than that.

FIRST is still stuck in my life. How do I know? I know because today when my team played in the finals of the North Carolina Regional because there wasn’t a live feed, I was frantically texting my brother for score updates while also quickly texting my friend Luke to discuss the situation and strategy for each match. I know because today I refreshed the North Carolina Regional Award’s List every 15 seconds while texting Luke with pointless texts like “Ahhh!!” and “the nerves!” until finally we learned that our team had won its first FIRST Chairman’s Award. I know because at that moment I started to cry and Luke began to dance (which is probably more significant than me crying). Why did we care so much? We cared because it wasn’t the team that we used to be on that had won a huge award, it was our team that won and it will always be that way.

I may nominally be an alumnus of FIRST team 2614, but that’s not really accurate. Though, I can no longer physically build our robot each year, mentor in our FLL program, or drive our robots in our local parades, my team can’t get rid of me that easily. I may go to college 12 hours away from my hometown, but as long as team 2614 exists I’ll be watching the computer, cell phone, or even the smoke signals to find out how we do. Being part of a FIRST team isn’t a four -year commitment; it’s a lifelong commitment to butterflies during alliance selection and non-existent vocal chords on Sunday mornings. As long as there is a FIRST, I’ll be a part of it.

It makes sense then that I love the mechanical engineering part of my engineering course and have decided to concentrate in mechanical engineering next year because no matter how far I run away, FIRST always chases me down. The thing is I’ve realized that I don’t have a problem with that. FIRST is special. It’s not an extracurricular. It’s a community that doesn’t fade away with graduation, and if anything might even get stronger. It’s a program that has left such a lasting impact on me that I’m sure I’ll continue to see ways that FIRST has altered my life well into my adult life. It’s a mission that one can’t help but buy into and it’s knowledge that a group of students can truly make a difference. It’s the belief that we can achieve so much more through cooperation than competition that sticks with you well after the last coopertition point has been awarded. People say their extracurriculars take up their life, but FIRST is something that makes your life, and you can’t shake something like that. Whether or not I like it, the FIRST community, the FIRST mission, and the FIRST values will be will with me for life. So you tell me is FIRST worth it?