Application To Join A Team

[JustAThought]

Originally Posted by Kevin Selavko

I do believe that every kid should be aloud to try out a FRC Team, but they should be able to kick you off because of bad behavior. On our team we have a kid who constantly vandalizes our tools, robot, game pieces, desks, chairs, and walls with sharpie, paint, spray paint, superglue, and hot glue. But because we have a no cut policy hew has to stay. I don't think you have any idea how much of a pain it is to take off hot glue from your electronics board. Also his behavior antagonizes the other younger members to goof off too.
With the time commitment we are aloud to have one other competing interest such as a sport during the 6 weeks. We are also required to go twice during the week and every Saturday for those 6 weeks-its really not that long.

That was bad wording on my part. Cut policies for behaviour and things of that nature are needed. However, cut because you have other things you do is just crazy. We have many students on our team who work, play sports and do this. If the kid is willing to work hard, they should not be punished.

[Billfred]

Some points:

1) Anonymous accounts are not allowed in the ChiefDelphi rules. Use the FIRST-A-Holics Anonymous forum for situations where divorcing one's name is necessary. (That's my moderator hat on.)

2) I can think of many reasons to deny a student membership on an FRC team. Much like you mention, we have had students there who were acting a fool, whose grades weren't good enough, and so on. Other students, much as we'd love to have them, were just too booked up with other things to be considered full-fledged team members. Some teams may just not be as able to handle part-timers (for example, some teams build in restricted areas that require badges and special permission).

3) How dare anyone dictate how another team does business. I want to get as many deserving kids competing in FRC as possible, but FIRST is not a right. It's hard work to organize a team, especially if the district or primary sponsor has rules that must be adhered to. (For example, our team can't fundraise until August.)

If you've got an issue or a better way, take it up with the leadership of the team. Or failing that, find another team that's willing to take them in. Some teams have more flexibility.

[Garrett.d.w]

Originally Posted by JustAThought

I have had multiple people I know go through the same thing, and it has now finally got me to the point of wondering,"Why?"

The answer to your question will very team by team. Each team is in a unique set of circumstances which dictates the policies of said team. If you feel strongly about this, then I suggest that you investigate this further. You will find that your opinion will evolve as you learn more.

Never judge a book by it's cover. Right now (with the information given in this thread) it looks like you have just scratched the surface. Talk to the team leadership and ask politely, without criticism, the reasons for their application policy. You may learn something


PS: Thank you for being considerate and not sharing the team's number.

[JustAThought]

I will, after this post, refrain from further comments.

I have seen through these posts that most people only wish to find reasons why to turn kids down. To me, it is sad. FIRST saved my life, if it wasn't for FIRST, I would have no future. I did not want to do this anonymously, however I did not want my views reflected as my teams views. They have no idea I posted this, nor will they ever know it was me.

My experience at FIRST has shown me the power it has on kids. If you get them involved in something they like, they will never let it go. I can see that has been forgotten. It is rather disappointing not to see more people like the leadership I had growing up in this organization. Leaders who were willing to find ways to make deals and work with the kids. We have plans for if the entire school were to join, and it would keep them all engaged.

To Chief Delphi, I bid you a fair well. I hope that one day, we will find a way to give every kid who wants to be a FIRST member to be a FIRST member and an application will only be used to show progress. Until then, I will be working with my team to continue recruiting and growing our team. No matter how large it gets, we will ALWAYS have room for them in our family.

[Anupam Goli]

For what each team is, it depends on the interpretation of what FIRST is.

For some, FRC is a sport. For others, it's only a hobby or interest. For those who treat it as a sport, it makes sense to restrict entry and exit. I know some Michigan teams hold tryouts for their team. 1717 only allows the seniors in the engineering academy to be on the team. It really depends on interpretation. Heck, I would want to treat FRC more as a sport, and make it restrict. There's an inspiration in being rejected, because it makes you try harder the next time.


As for termination, FRC is a very time-consuming venture. I'm not surprised at the stringency of the requirements. I was nearly booted out of my seat as president of the Computer Honor Society because i couldn't attend any meetings due to the FRC season. It's very time consuming. It's not just 6 weeks, it's a year long process. During my Senior year of high school, I only had time for FRC and nothing else, because I took it seriously and wanted to improve.

As for entry fees, it makes sense. Band has them. At my school, all clubs and sports had dues. The Robotics team was no different. The dues were a way to weed some people out. We had over 100 members join, but only 50 or so dues paying members because we set the dues at $50. This weeds out those who just wish to write Robotics on their college app and provides the initial funds to register for the season. It's not wrong to have fees. All high schools in my county had them for each grade level.

Keeping an open-door policy is good, but sometimes it doesn't bring the best results. If you keep it a bit closed, efficiency and productivity goes up. It makes sense, and it's all interpretation.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by JustAThought

Perhaps I am just another student, who came from a poor school, who saw something so amazing that I wanted everyone in this nation to be involved in, then I saw teams telling kids they can't join and that is what provoked it. I know my team, no matter the size, will never turn down students. We will continue to embrace them as they come and do whatever it is we must to accommodate the new demand.

I wish I could do this, I worked with an inner city team for years and saw the impact FIRST had on those students. However, there comes a point where the ratio is simply too low (mentor:student) to ensure safety for everyone involved.

[quote=JustAThought;1169945]Removal from a team because of inactivity is one thing, however, removal because you cannot be there the entire time is a completely different matter.
[\Quote]
Not at all, if I have 50 students and can only accept 25 but 12 of them know they can't be there but half the meetings they should not take spots away from the ones who can dedicate the full time. I think most of this comes down to simply informing students that it is a time commitment. However, I do agree with you that it is a little extreme. Perhaps the team had problems with it in the past. Again, we don't know all the situation with the team (you probably don't either). Making decisions on partial information is a bad idea.

Our build space can only fit, comfortably and with everyone working, 10 people. Yet, we have 30 kids. We find things for them to do. We keep them engaged. We constantly challenge them to find ways to make our team better. And the kids learn and prosper. We have very limited full time mentors, I myself am not a full time mentor. Scheduling what kids can do is important if you want to keep large amounts involved. Get kids excited about FIRST, and believe me, you hardly need to watch them. Just let them go and prosper.

No. You need to watch them. We build FTC in a persons house. A) It is their home and I wouldn't want children wandering around my home. B) We do work with power tools (even more so in FRC) and I have always held that any student that is using a tool that has a motor in it needs to at least have an adult supervising them (even if it is just watching out of the corner of their eye) in case they get hurt.

In my case I have access to a larger site that is slightly better suited to our needs and we are working on moving there BUT I will still need to watch students very carefully (this time for legal reasons). Which still puts a limit onto the number of people that can come in. Again, it comes down to how many people the mentors feel comfortable working with.

Originally Posted by JustAThought

I will, after this post, refrain from further comments.

I have seen through these posts that most people only wish to find reasons why to turn kids down. To me, it is sad. FIRST saved my life, if it wasn't for FIRST, I would have no future. I did not want to do this anonymously, however I did not want my views reflected as my teams views. They have no idea I posted this, nor will they ever know it was me.

My experience at FIRST has shown me the power it has on kids. If you get them involved in something they like, they will never let it go. I can see that has been forgotten. It is rather disappointing not to see more people like the leadership I had growing up in this organization. Leaders who were willing to find ways to make deals and work with the kids. We have plans for if the entire school were to join, and it would keep them all engaged.

To Chief Delphi, I bid you a fair well. I hope that one day, we will find a way to give every kid who wants to be a FIRST member to be a FIRST member and an application will only be used to show progress. Until then, I will be working with my team to continue recruiting and growing our team. No matter how large it gets, we will ALWAYS have room for them in our family.

I don't want to turn away kids. I never claimed that and frankly I would never turn away a student that wanted to learn. There are simply certain limits that are based on hard facts. I cannot safely watch more than 15 students with the current mentor force. Furthermore I cannot ensure that each student is getting the attention that they need. If there is sufficient interest I will be attempting to approach these problems via other means. Ultimately, I can't tell them no. It's why I spend thousands of my own dollars helping teams every year. But there are certain things I can't control. Physical space... safety...money... I can influence them but frankly... there's only so much I can do. If you have ways I can scale this stuff infinitely let me know cuz I'd love to. 79 had, at the start of this season, 80 students. I'd love to see that number go to 160 and still have an even higher percentage of students participating. To have you say I don't care about students is, frankly, a huge insult and I suggest you not toss that around. None of us would be here if we didn't.

[Ekcrbe]

I think this can be turned around and looked at the other way:

If you* can't make it to enough (enough is subjective) meetings and team activities, then why should he/she be allowed to be considered part of the team? As Billfred pointed out, FIRST is not a right, it's a privilege, and to add on to JosephC about our team, you can't play winter sports and be on the team. It's not because we don't want you, it just doesn't work. There are always some exceptions to be made for special circumstances, but being on the team means being with the team. Plus, if you can't be at the majority of required team activities, are you even learning anything? It would be a sleight to FIRST and deceit on your part to claim FIRST experience without actually going through the whole process. Any other sport requires that you be involved and academically and behaviorally eligible. FIRST teams should hold their students to even higher standards. Our team put up a big list on the whiteboard in our main meeting room of priorities, to remind everyone that FIRST comes after school. They say FIRST looks good on college resumes, but you have to get to college (i.e. graduate high school) for that to matter.

*Obviously, you is not directed at anyone, but rather the hypothetical subject of this situation.

Sorry for my very long-windedness and disorganization, but I hate leaving out thoughts.

P.S. If it was my team that was the subject of the OP, I would feel attacked and hurt by this post. This was a scathing and unprovoked attack that is unquestionably leaps and bounds farther outside the ideals of FIRST than any acceptance/denial program any team has. Imagine your team being the recipient of a post like this. If you think you need to be anonymous so that your team is not aligned with these thoughts, what does that mean of your thoughts? To me, it seems to mean that it would be embarrassing for your team if the world knew one of theirs believes something like this, and therefore this information should not be public.

[Garret]

My team has struggled with this issue a lot. We have had the policy where we let anyone join the team and be a part of it. That policy turned out to be a problem in that we had a whole bunch of people who would show up maybe once a week or a few times the whole season and then expect us to update them and make it like they had been there the whole time. If the team had sufficient mentors to make that happen I would be glad to accommodate this, however, when you have 35 kids at a meeting and 3 mentors that type of thing is unacceptable.

In addition to this, FIRST offers students a great deal of benefits in terms of applying to colleges and scholarships. I think its unfair that a student who shows up to 1 meeting a week to be given the same opportunities (in terms of scholarships) as the student who has put countless hours of work into FIRST. In my mind that is not fair.

I will add a final point about my own team. My dad was the main administrative, technical, and business mentor (basically the only mentor there all the time) for the past 4 years on team 691. He does all of this during what little free time he has left after doing his regular job, which is being the one-man patent department for a micro-device company. During the build season he has to balance work and an entire FRC team on his own. If a team member expects my dad to be at every meeting, yet they aren't willing to make the program a priority I find it offensive and disrespectful. Its like saying oh, golf is a real team, robotics is just a club.

I apologize if my post is offensive to you (or anyone else), but frankly I am really quite offended by your posts.
(Also your team application you described sounds a whole lot like my teams application)

[Radical Pi]

I can understand where all this is coming from. While we want to give this experience to as many people as possible, for two years now our team has been faced with the prospect of being forced to set a hard limit on the number of people in the team as we've grown to 60+ students. Luckily, both years the district has been gracious enough to donate the salary for an extra teacher to supervise us, and we haven't had to go through with any cuts.

Our process for handling this kind of thing is to conduct interviews with the new potential members. If we do ever have to perform cuts, the decision will probably be based off of what they could potentially contribute to the team and how much time they could dedicate. I'll admit that saying no to a potential member is an extremely difficult thing to do, but sometimes it simply can't be avoided.

The only "dues" we have for our members is that they participate in fundraisers and demonstrations during the offseason. We also have academic requirements during the season, though those are usually of the form "take half a week to cool off and catch up". We also require that students pay a part of the travel costs for any event they go to, though scholarships are available. Often we also have more students wanting to go to each regional than we can take, and in those cases the final decision is made based on contribution during the build season.

One related question I'd like to pose to the forum: In the recent years the district has been pushing hard for us to improve the diversity of our team (build a 50% boy/girl ratio, recruit more underrepresented minorities, etc.). How do your teams factor that kind of thing in when/if deciding who to turn away from the team?

[dtengineering]

Originally Posted by JustAThought

I will, after this post, refrain from further comments.

I have seen through these posts that most people only wish to find reasons why to turn kids down. To me, it is sad. FIRST saved my life, if it wasn't for FIRST, I would have no future. I did not want to do this anonymously, however I did not want my views reflected as my teams views. They have no idea I posted this, nor will they ever know it was me.

My experience at FIRST has shown me the power it has on kids. If you get them involved in something they like, they will never let it go. I can see that has been forgotten. It is rather disappointing not to see more people like the leadership I had growing up in this organization. Leaders who were willing to find ways to make deals and work with the kids. We have plans for if the entire school were to join, and it would keep them all engaged.

To Chief Delphi, I bid you a fair well. I hope that one day, we will find a way to give every kid who wants to be a FIRST member to be a FIRST member and an application will only be used to show progress. Until then, I will be working with my team to continue recruiting and growing our team. No matter how large it gets, we will ALWAYS have room for them in our family.

I ran this through google translate... it came out as:

"Since some of you dare to see shades of grey in what is clearly a matter of right and wrong, you are obviously unworthy of further attention. I will go be awesome now. Adieu, petty-minded deniers of opportunity!"

Ah, how I miss being young and knowing everything.

Jason

[Undertones]

It's unfortunate you had to go through that, but every FIRST team does their own thing. I'm pretty sure there's no rule that states teams have to support STEM education (although I could be wrong). It sucks, it does, but there's nothing any of us can do.

Which team was this? I'm somewhat curious. If you don't want to share that, that's fine too.

And, as an afterthought, why doesn't your girlfriend's son just join your team?

[Karibou]

Originally Posted by JustAThought

However, cut because you have other things you do is just crazy. We have many students on our team who work, play sports and do this. If the kid is willing to work hard, they should not be punished.

That's all fine and dandy for your team. In fact, mine was very similar, in that as long as you showed up pretty regularly and didn't cause problems or slack off, you were on the roster. We did have to complete pre-season training and log a certain amount of shop hours to travel "with the team" to competitions, but it was overall pretty flexible.

Originally Posted by JustAThought (from first post)

To think I could have been cut from my team simply because I wanted to do other things is simply unacceptable.

There are two sports that we knew we had conflicts with, and students who wished to be involved with those were given the ultimatum of "us or them," because we knew, from past experience, that in the end both teams (and the student) suffered because of the student's split time. While I would rather not turn down a student because of time constraints, there are some occasions where it is the best way to go. I'll save my stories and examples, since there are already plenty given in this thread (necessary security clearance, school limitations, etc).


I feel as if I may know what team you're talking about, having both seen a lengthy application and talked to members of the team before. They had to add an application process because they didn't have the facilities, mentors, or teachers to support the amount of interest they were getting. Then again, I'm sure there are several MI teams that have this practice, and probably for the same reason. Not every team can run the same way, and I ask that you take a moment to consider that and be a bit more open-minded before you start claiming that there is a "right" and a "wrong" way to run a team.

[Tristan Lall]

Elsewhere on the Internet, I was reading about places that require applications to acquire a rescued dog. Although the conditions they set were reasonable individually, and the idea of a screening questionnaire was reasonable and even prudent, the particular mix of questions and the format in which they were presented was borderline offensive and almost assuredly counterproductive.

I think something similar is happening here. The team has legitimate interests, and probably has an extreme aversion to the kinds of risks represented by students with split commitments. It's just unfortunate that they feel their only defence is to be completely inflexible about it by insisting upon an onerous agreement.

I disagree with you (to some extent, at least) about a lot of the individual policies, but I think you've correctly identified a system that is flawed on balance.

[ttldomination]

I don't know what I can offer the OP here that others haven't already said.

I would perhaps highlight the fact that you have to start thinking outside of your box, especially if you're going to post on CD.

Take my team for example, this year, we pushed close to 30 regularly attending members. Our PR "squad" has been doing excellent work, and we're expecting anywhere from 20-30 new members next year. Now, we can neither sustain a team of that size (as of now) nor see fit to that kind of growth, so we're implementing a tiny application system to see what kind of students we're really getting.

Now, take the very innocent scenario above, and add a slightly more intense variables. A sustainable team of 45 or 50 regular members? An extremely successful program? I hope you can understand why applications serve the better interest of not only the current team, but also of the new members to eventually join.

- Sunny G.

[Tetraman]

For 174, it is the school's policy that students with a grade average of 69 or lower are not allowed in extracurricular activities unless they get proper signatures and approvals. Not the team's policy, but the school's. Part of FIRST is learning and succeeding in school. If your grades drop too low either during or before FIRST season (and trust me they do) then you are taking the team too seriously and not your school work - which should be taken just as or even more seriously. It makes sense to encourage students to continue to work hard in school as they attend 3-5 meeting sessions a week for robotics. And if one of those ways is to give them an ultimatum on being kicked out if their grades are too low, then have at it.

Our team dislikes an application process, and because of our high mentor count and time given to use the facilities, we use pre-season meetings and lectures to determine which students aren't taking the little things seriously, and then cutting based off of that. Not all teams have this luxury.

Anyway, everything is a learning process - think of the kinds of applications these students fill out for their part time jobs and how they can word things right to get the job or word things wrong to get overlooked.

tl;dr - Every team is different. Every team works with their own system and that system is going to be much different than your team's system. That doesn't mean it is wrong, it just means it is different.