The negative effects of FRC

[alicen]

I really only want to touch on this one point since I've been out of the actually being on a team game for a while and haven't been to Champs in about 6 years.

Competitions start early, and end late. If you account for a healthy breakfast and dinner, this means that students often get 4-6 hours of sleep on competition nights, when they have to go work themselves to the point of exhaustion.

I've been a volunteer for a long time, and almost always would arrive with my family about an hour or so before anything is open to the teams. We also left about an hour or so after the teams, depending on how the event went on any given day. If you add the travel time to home/hotels into that, somehow we still manage 6-8 hours of sleep. Yes, a lot of that has to do with having the discipline to go to sleep at 10pm and wake up at 5 or 6am, but a lot of the "I only got 4-6 hours of sleep!!" has more to do with staying up late outside of the event. I was that student back in the day too, I stayed up and exhausted myself over the weekend.

On a different side of the sleep deprivation - it kind of lends itself to the real world. Sometimes you will have projects at work that cause you to work long hours for deadlines and get little sleep for a few days. Then once your deadlines are hit, you go back to a more normal sleep/work schedule.

So in short, I don't see a few days of exhaustion/sleep deprivation/stressful choices as negative. They are opportunities to learn from the experience so that when you arrive in the real world at a job you are more prepared for what gets thrown your way.