FIRST Experience Story

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Often I wonder how many people attend engineering colleges that were in some way involved with FIRST. And of those, how many stay involved with FIRST? When mentioning FIRST, the usual answer I get is, "Oh yeah, I did FIRST in high school." As if after getting your diploma, it somehow becomes a childish or unimportant thing to do. Granted, their are often bigger projects to work on at an engineering school (not to mention tons of coursework to keep up with), but FIRST is in no way something that can only be relevant to high school students. I thought I'd share one of my own recent experiences as an example:

I was offered a research position working on a hydrostatic bearing system. The professor and graduate student in charge of the project were looking for someone who "had their [stuff] together." Having done FIRST for two years in high shool and two years as a college student mentor, my experience showed. One of my first tasks was/is putting together a control box for a system consisting of six pumps with an encoder and a pressure transducer for each. The original idea was to order industrial rate meters for the encoders, at $120 each. My first thought was, "Why not do this with one $5 PIC chip and some LCDs?" Even though I've never done it, I know plenty of FIRST teams have used encoders before and at the rates we are using, one should be able to handle all six inputs. I suggested the PIC solution to the professor and now it looks like it's going to happen...and I'll be putting it together.

I have always been amazed at how much you can learn in FIRST. And it is done in a very integrated way - they way it happens in real life. In a college environment, where you get more pronounced separation of mechanical and electrical engineering / computer science majors, knowing how to fit the two together is a very valuable skill.

So if you happen to go on to an engineering school, consider staying involved with FIRST. It's a huge time commitment and sometimes hard to balance with classwork, but you can get a lot of out it...and not only in the altruistic "it's a good thing to do" sense. It gives you an advantage in many disciplines to have the experience with design/CAD/control - often your classwork will just be learning the rigorous theory behind what you already know. And often your experience will be noticed and opportunites will present themselves for internships and reasearch positions.

Best of luck to everyone - I know a lot of seniors have important decisions to make in the next couple of months.

-Shane