Everyone's A Winner?

[Lil' Lavery]

Originally Posted by dodar

Then why do you have the kids from your team build robots?

If it isn't important, just have them focus on Chairman's during build season.

Building and competing are tremendously important. Nobody is pretending that this isn't about the robots. The experiences gained by designing, fabricating, modelling, iterating, programming, and testing a robot are incredible. Getting to function in a high paced, high energy environment like the competition is a crucial experience. All of that is important. The build season is important. The competition is important. However, collecting a banner is not.

Five years down the line, nobody is going to care about what trophies you won as a high school student. However, the experiences you gained and the connections you made are going to be tremendously important throughout your life. Learning the value of STEM and empowering those around you to celebrate STEM is important. Being able to communicate those values is important. And Chairman's caliber teams are better at those aspects than anyone else. Chairman's caliber programs pump out tremendous alumni and create environments in their community that value STEM.

Case in point, I have a FIRST Vex Challenge world championship on my resume. When going through job interviews during and after college, that was discussed for maybe 30 seconds total. Explaining FIRST and FRC in general was discussed far more, and there was far more interest in discussion in the types of mechanisms created and the impact of the program than about the fact I had won a trophy in FVC.