What Exactly Does FIRST Mean To You?

[Solace]

FIRST, while a great program, has made me somewhat of a cynic.

I've learned a couple things through the years:

A) Democracy is a fatally flawed an useless for of authority. in trying to give everyone a say, a team will descend into chaos and malice.

B) Nothing will ever get done unless somebody actually goes and do it. And unless they are actually in the process of doing whatever it is, chances are that it is not going to get done.

C) politics, both within a team and between teams, can be extremely touchy and potentially volatile. Everyone is so intoxicated by this notion of "gracious professionalism" that they take it to the extend where it contradicts the very foundation of FIRST. While FIRST does help further education and inspiration and all that good stuff, it is now and always be at its heart, a competition. Teams build a robot so that they can win. It is the definition of a competition. Although Gracious Professionalism is a very good thing if people understand it in the light through which it was originally intended, the highly charged political/social atmosphere of the first community ocassionally twists it into a construct that in the end detracts from the experience.

D) Winning does matter. If someone tries to say that it does not, than that person has obviously never dedicated 6 weeks of their lives to the building of a robot. no one comes to a competition so they can lose, no matter how much fun they had along the way. Besides, if it doesn't matter, than why do we keep score?

E) A team's competitiveness is due 50% to robot ability and 50% to driver ability. this is another area where anything other than a completely centralized system of organization will be grossly ineficient. Also the most efficient way for a drive team to communicate is to not require communication. A driver who requires someone else to make the strategy decisions for them will be inefficient, for no matter how well thought out the strategy it will be corrupted in trying to communicate through the frenzied environment of a match. All strategic authority must be centered in the driver, and his mandates must be followed without hesitation. There is no room inside a drive team for making sure that no one's feelings get hurt.



Though it may sound like I am just complaining for the sake of complaining, the fact that I was able to condense most if not all of my complaints about the program into a single post does give a compliment of sorts to FIRST. There is even the chance that some of my complaints are unique to my team, although for most of them I highly doubt it. Though I had fun throughout my four years in the program, if given the chance there were a great many things I would have changed in both the way our team was organized and the way we thought of the program as a whole.