Positive Experiences with Dominant Teams

[rachelholladay]

I too have way, way too many stories to share all or even a decent sized fraction. Heck, sometimes I feel as though I've been mentored by someone through their CD / FIRSTForge posts. There are plenty of people I've never personally met and they probably don't know how much they have help me. (That's why I occasionally send a PM that only says something like "Thank you for posting, you are awesome, please carry on in your awesomeness"). But I will share a few experiences that have really, really stuck with me, maybe because they are odd or maybe because they happened to me when I was a freshman.

• Our team qualified for CMP in 2010 and I volunteered on Archimedes. I was talking to my sister when we saw the (super, super spirited) Pink team in the stands blowing bubbles. My sister went to go ask if we could have some, but unfortunately there were no more in the stands. Aw, bummer, back to volunteering. The next day Pink is in eliminations, I think it was the semis and you can just see the look of concentration on every competing team's faces. In the middle of all of that intensity, the one of the lead Pink mentors, mentor that was / is their drive coach, went out of his way to give me, some random volunteer, a thing of bubbles. it was a pretty minor act, but it made me feel so happy and grateful - I still have the, now empty, bubble container.

• When I was just getting started with web development, I looked to other team's websites for inspiration and made pages upon pages of lists profiling and describing about two dozen team websites. Of the websites I looked to was the 2010 Best Website at CMP award winner, some team none of us down here had ever heard of - Simbotics. I became a little obsessed with their 2010 website, I read every bit of it like twice, I had all these notes and generally took a lot of inspiration from it. It just had so much information, including their Chairman's Award essays. Now our team had won RCA once, but we really felt as though we still didn't know what we were doing and we didn't have, I guess, a model of what a truly excellent essay sounds like. Welp, I had found it. I read it, was completely blown away and then emailed my team "Dude, guys, I found these Canadians and they are awesome and this is what we need to be like." We studied their outreach programs and essay, and a lot of what we have done has been based off what we read that summer. I really don't know if we would have won the Chairman's Award again without having been inspired and guided by them. Since their website shared their written essays with me, I have always put our written essays on our website (and actually as much documentation as possible). The years we won 'Best Website' at our regional we were commended for displaying all our award essays - and I was just sitting there thinking, don't give me the credit for that, I did it because 1114 did it. I can pretty confidently say that this whole 'experience' shaped my FIRST experience in a major way, and the interaction was not with a team member or mentor, but with their URL.

• Along the same 'inspiration for outreach idea' is a story I have already told - http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...2&postcount=18