Tee Shirts

[Jasmine Zhou]

I'm perfectly happy to wear my team shirts in public. However, team shirts are part of our uniform at not-very-formal presentations, at our weekly booth at the farmer's market, and of course at competitions. This means that if I wear team shirts outside of those events, I run the risk of the shirts not making it through the laundry in time for the next team-related event, especially if I need to lend spares to newer members of the team.
(I wear team shirts more often now that I've been on an FRC team for two years and have older shirts with an out-of-date list of sponsors on them, but I still haven't gotten out of the habit of saving them for team events.)

For advertising the fact that I'm involved in FIRST and that FIRST exists, I much prefer my pair of FIRST-logo earrings. In my experience, people usually don't comment on our team shirt unless they already know what it's about, while whenever I wear the earrings I get compliments and questions. As soon as someone asks me about them or mentions that they look cute, I take the opportunity to practice my elevator pitch. (With the earrings as a starting point, I almost convinced one of the cheerleaders to come check out our team, but their practice schedule conflicts with our meeting schedule.)