Why are YOU involved in FIRST?

[Dan-o]

I originally joined FIRST when I was first introduced to the program when mentors and students from team 365 (MOE) put on a demonstration at my high school.... some 20 miles away from their home base. The team was looking for prospective members for their 2003 season. I had already known that I wanted to go into robotics, so I jumped at the opportunity to learn more about the field, and play with futuristic machines in a national competition.

I soon found out that FIRST was about so much more than building a machine. After going to many meetings, the build season started, and I was bombarded with slogans like gracious professionalism, of which i though I understood. The build season came to an end and our bot was shipped away in a crate. This almost made me cry. I had grown so attached to this thing that I had poured my heart and soul into for 6 short weeks. I have never felt such a sense of accomplishment in my life as the day that bot finally worked. This feeling of pride emitted itself from my being weeks after the competition season ended.

I'm overlapping here... Annapolis regional in 2003 was not my first competition experience, as I had traveled to several off-season competitions with the 2002 bot, however the scale of this event was unimaginable to me. Almost 70 teams from all over the place were assembled with the projects that they too had poured their heart and soul into. After a few matches pass during the practice day, I see a bot start letting out its magic smoke on the field. One of my team's mentors immediately sent all but one person from my pit crew over to see if there was anything we could do to help. I was thinking... "wait a second... isn't this a competition?.... don't we do better if they do worse?" I followed the pit crew over and saw the burnt robot being worked on by people from at least 4 different teams. Finally, I was introduced to the true meaning of Gracious Professionalism. It didn't matter if they were going to eventually be competing against our team. All that mattered was for them to get the same experience and fun out of the competition that we had. This is why I will probably be involved in FIRST until the day I die.

With all that said (sorry for being so long winded), I am in FIRST because it is one of the very few competitions in which teams are willing to help their opponents, to the extent that they may be sacrificing a win, or even a championship.



P.S. I do like to mentor high school students as well, but that's not what originally grabbed my attention.