Corporations Build Robots

[Eugenia Gabrielov]

I think this is an issue that needs to be carefully and sensitively addressed as FIRST expands and more and more teams are formed. To focus on one aspect of your question - I would like to point out what exactly corporate involvement might entail.

Corporate sponsorship of the technical sort is a different boat from standard small-organization sponsorship (e.g., a local company that earns a spot on the back of the team shirt). Let's look at some of the potential situations...

- Sheer monetary support: A corporate sponsor may fund the trip and registration fees for a team, or some of the material costs.
- Mentor support - an engineering firm (or university!) may provide a volunteer engineer who works with the team to provide support and teach key lessons to students.
- Ongoing interaction - This might be a step above the standard "providing an engineer" situation. The company might invite the students for tours, provide the team information on upcoming / unique internship application opportunities, or request to be represented at competition.

- Technical Interaction - Here is the clincher. Technical interaction could come in a lot of forms. A company may go from offering workspace to constructing the robot entirely, and that is the grey area. There are so many options for the company (listed above) that I feel can be more mutually profitable - without taking over the key task of this competition, the company can gain a valuable and talented potential future workforce, and / or a great deal of PR.

So yes, maybe this overwhelming involvement happens once in a rare while. However, there are so many ways that it doesn't lead to success, that I feel the problem has, in some ways, fixed itself over time while FIRST as a program remained smaller and more intimate. However, rookie teams now have a lot more experience to draw from, a lot more potential veterans in the area, and maybe, just maybe, a more solid image of what students alone are capable of in that short six week period in January and February.