Overbearing Parents

[ScottM]

I'm going to take a swag (guess) and say that your parents will listen to someone in a position of authority. Find out if there will be college recruiters at one of your competitions. Invite (beg?) your parents to come to the competition and talk to the recruiters.

Then remind them that people such as;

Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman, Google, and W. James McNerney, Jr., Chairman, President and CEO, The Boeing Company, have been elected to the Board of Directors of FIRST

Good luck and persevere.

[Rangel]

It sounds like you've been a part of your team for a while now and if your parents don't understand the importance of it now, they probably never will. My advice is to keep doing what you can do be as involved with your team as much as possible. For example if your parents don't want to give you rides, find other modes such as friends or the bus. I'm a little on the side of Nathan in terms of radicalness being in a similar situation not too long ago. I don't suggest to go as far as forging permission slips but maybe stay later in robotics than your supposed to some days and stuff like that. Do what you can to make your parents happy though. Keep up with grades and schoolwork, tell them what they want to hear if you get into one sided arguments about robotics again, and give your coach contact information anyways and just say your coach got it from school system. You probably won't convince them that robotics is the best use of your time but you have a good chance of remaining active since they've allowed you to stay on this long.

[Qbot2640]

I have had several of my past team members come back and tell me that during their college interviews, when FIRST Robotics was brought up it dominated the remainder of the interview...so the nervous student undergoing this high-stakes interview suddenly gets to speak much more comfortably about a topic that they know intimately. They have told me that it made a major difference in the success of the interview. (And each one who told me this, was successfully admitted to their first choice of universities.)