College Students: How is your experience in FIRST?

[Matt Adams]

Originally Posted by Matt Adams

...there's a handful of college students who are really able to commit the amount of time needed to inspire and teach students while building a well designed, competitive robot.

I'm not exactly sure if I need post this, but I guess I should perhaps tack on another characteristic about college sponsored programs that people may not think about.

Alumni.

Purdue University often talks about how there are more Purdue engineers practicing than from any other school in the country. Countless people stop by and say, "Hey, I went to Purdue! How are your robot doing?"

Mind you, there is NO PRESSURE from the alumni, they're honestly just curious. They're not going to pull funding or kick me off the team... I just have a huge amount of respect for Purdue and its alumni.

When those alumni ask me how we're doing, I want to be able to say, "We're doing great, our robot's performing well, and we're 4-2 today."

Saying "Uh, our robot's over the weight limit, our drive system broke down and we're 1-5" is something I just couldn't say.

Since I won't dare compromise the integrity of our team by cheating or entering grey areas, it means only one thing- we gotta work harder both in and out of season.

Since we have no practicing engineers, we need to rapidly educate our advisors and high schoolers with bare bones engineering information so that we're on the same page, on a yearly basis. I'll openly admit that some of our seniors this year were significantly better than a few new advisors, it's because of experience, dedication, and education that they've recieved.

On the plus side, since we have no practicing engineers and I'm among the oldest advisors, I need to be REALLY sure I can apply the engineering I'm learning in the classroom to real life. If this means getting ahead in a course to decide if a part will fail due to loading... I'm going to do it.

Maybe this is the way that engineers feel about the companies they work for, and maybe not. But nevertheless, this is something a lot of the advisors from Purdue and I feel very strongly about.

Matt