a club for college FIRST-a-holics

[Ken Leung]

Was talking to a few college FIRSTers about having something like a club, or organization, for all the college FIRST participates, and I am wondering how many will be interested in joining.

It would be something easy to do, just a website, and a e-mail list... The goal is to get all the college FIRSTers to know who else are doing FIRST while attend school after they graduated high school, and share the experience.

We could do something like "top advices to keep you from burning out", and "how to handle a lab report and two papers while designing a 2 speed transmission", and share stories about the whole experience. Or how about a list of AIM/yahoo/icq/msn screen names? Maybe even an index of which college the students are at? We can even arrange meetings or getting dinner together at competitions.

The most important part of this is to make people understand "we are not alone out there... there are a lot of people like me struggling through midterms while attending robotics competition with teams". Then the second most important part of this is building up a network of college FIRSTers, and maybe do something more than just helping teams with your experience.

Then of course, we are doing this for fun. The less work it take, the happier we all are.

Let me know if anyone is interested.

For all you high school students out there... don't forget, you will graduate one day, and you might find the urge to find yourself a FIRST team at your college, maybe even the passion to start up a new team just because there isn't one around the school you are going to, despite how many classes you are taking and how many minor degrees you are working for.

I am absolutely positively not kidding, getting addicted to FIRST is worse than anything I've ever seen, including breathing air or getting sleep or sanity. Some might even give up some of those addiction just so they can satisfy their need for FIRST, while getting new addictions to things like caffine and donuts.


So... I guess I am just suggesting that us addicts should come together so:

1. More students can be like us, and
2. have fun sharing the experience