[FRC Blog] U.S. Air Force Offering Leadership Seminar Opportunity for FIRST Teachers

[zcohen]

I attended it last year.
Let me tell you, it was cool. Like, super cool. The things you saw were amazing, and the fact that you spent no money, got awesome food the whole time, even got a government travel stipend, and best of all got to meet amazing people from all over the country made it one of the better trips I've ever done, and by far one of the best professional developments I've ever done (only better being NASA WRATS. Check it out, amazing).
That being said, if you want to go to learn leadership skills, dont hold your breath. On the whole trip we only had two short sessions for leadership training. One was taught by a lieutenant who was seriously great at her job and I learned an immense amount from her. The second one was supposed to be her too, but she got outranked and we were spoken to by someone else who didnt really teach us anything and just told us his life storyish.
The whole trip was a thinly veiled recruitment tool for the Air Force. Dont get me wrong, it was still amazing, and I have a whole new respect for a lot of people/jobs, plus learned a lot, but in the end it was clear they wanted us to go back and recruit our students to the Air Force. And I'm fine with that because the experiences were great as well, but its certainly not a leadership training experience. Simply just a really cool free trip that I still recommend as long as you go into it not expecting to learn many leadership skills to bring back to your kids.