Girls on FIRST teams

[EvilMonkyPirate]

I've always loved my team for their female involvement in the team. Every year we've had atleast one female captain (me this year) and not becuase we made sure of it but becuase they were just always voted in that way. Also every year that team 166 has been around the faculty advisor has also been a female.

We prided? ourselves in past years for our 19-20, male-female ratio. The last few years have been hard to recruit new females seeing how the group of us on the team now have been friends since elementary school so, um, all of our friends are there already. We still try to recruit new friends we meet but most of them just think we're crazy for wanting to get our hands a little greasy.

A lot of people look at my life and at the life of the other captain on the team and claim that FIRST takes up too much time. This also makes it really hard to recruit new girls. A lot of times though we'll have people visit our shop during build season and they'll see how much the girls on our team actually do, we have some in every aspect of the team except Pro-E which consists of two males.

I also have a different view on FIRST than most people. See I don't want to be an engineer. I want to own a daycare or be a first grade teacher. FIRST is actually helping me to do that in some ways. You meet a lot of different people at competitions and other things the team might do and you have to be able to get along with these people. As a teacher you meet different types of students and you need to be compatible with atleast most of them. The leadership skills that i'm learning from being captain also play into if I actually succeed in owning a daycare i'll have to be able to control the environment and the other workers I may hire.

I try to explain FIRST in those ways to other girls but no one else seems to get it.

Tiffany George
Team 166