2013 Lessons Learned: The Negative

[dag0620]

I'm going to simply list off the big things, with some constructive criticism.

• Chairman's Award Process: As a student who's been involved I know it can be a daunting process preparing and submitting for it, and this is on a team that's had experiences in preparing this. Talking to numerous teams submitting for the first time, you can tell it's a confusing process for them. While the submission guidelines are clear (and I'll give props for that) we need some way to help make the process, especially for first timers, a little less scary. Also a little clarification or transparency on the judging process would be awesome.
  
• Non-STEM Students: I've always held the position that FIRST has become more about just getting kids into jobs with Science and Technology. While I love Science and Technology, I am pursuing a career in marketing. The thing is FIRST is what helped me find this career and I owe all of my future plans and discovering my passion for marketing to FIRST. Much of the community knows, and celebrates stories like mine. However once and a while, I still feel like a failure of the program due to the fact I'm not pursuing a career in STEM. Maybe we could just work on our attitudes of this program getting students in careers other than Science and Technology.
  
• 8 Matches at Champs: Been beat to death, just wanted to add I didn't like it.
  
• The Rooms at Championship Conferences: Karthik's Presentation was amazing, hopefully more people will get to learn from his knowledge.
  
• Einstein: Long, overdrawn. I'm glad the awards and matches are integrated. I think the issues is that there was a lot of awards and speeches spread out before matches. Fixing this really just comes down to distributing the awards and speeches a little more between matches. I do understand issues can arise from this (such as Chairman's may be awarded after some matches, and I understand this may flow bad) but it's somewhere to start looking.
  
• FIRST Finale: Crowded, Expensive, Food was alright. I'm sure HQ will look at this and fix it though.
  
• Dean's List Ceremony: My only issue is if the ceremony is over the lunch hour, it would be nice if the recipients were announced within the hour and it ended on time. Not really an issue for me, however I know my friends who were volunteers were not able to see the winners due to having to get back to work at 1.