To Those Submitting Awards...

[Pavan Dave]

For a while now the Unsung FIRST Heroes of Chief Delphi has been one of my favorite parts of the website. The people behind the scenes who may not get mentioned for the Woodie Flowers Award but do deserve credit for all of their hard work for making robotics possible for your team and maybe your community.

Please take a minute while you're submitting awards to take a look at the Chief Delphi's UHF winners of the past and if you know somebody deserves to be recognized, consider sending in a similar essay.

Maybe modding your WFA essay or writing a new one specifically for the UFH may seem like a little more work that you don't really have to do, but think of all that they've done for you. A little effort to appreciate their hard work isn't asking too much.


Note: I am not an official spokesman for UFH.

about:

Since this award started as a brainchild of a student on a team back in 2003, it grew to encompass FIRST in the best possible way – bringing forth positive examples of mentoring throughout our community. It served to show that the FIRST method of inspiring students worked both in and out of the classroom. Of course, it also highlighted some of the best and brightest minds in our program.

Our UFH Committee was honored to see that three of the last four Woodie Flowers Award winners had previously been UFH honorees. Potentially even more impressive is the fact that over 19 of our UFH honorees have been given the Woodie Flowers Finalist Award (approximately 1/3 of our winners). Many students have told us that the UFH nomination had given them extra practice on writing such an essay prior to submitting for the regional WFA.

With that in mind, we’ll be giving UFH a bit of a revamp. Although we still remain individual from the WFA, we’ll be working to create materials that will help you to write your essays for both awards. We’ll show you examples of past winning essays and give you tips and tricks on how to write clearly and effectively.

It would be, in a word, unfair not to bring back the Unsung FIRST Heroes Award. After all, even though we stopped honoring this award in December of 2006, since then we’ve received over 50 entries of students, teachers, and fellow mentors who have been nominated for this honor. We still have these on file and will consider them for future UFH honorees.

While it is not a mission of the FIRST programs to teach but to inspire, it is the UFH Committee’s mission to help teach you how to harness that inspiration and share it with the world. We know that each entry we read is a priceless token of your gratitude and enthusiasm.

To see a list of previous Unsung FIRST Heroes Honorees please click here.

Nominate Someone!


Enjoy,
Pavan Davé

[JaneYoung]

The UFH has been so inconsistent and basically - dead - that I would be hesitant to encourage people to submit essays that they pour their hearts and souls into, only to have them be filed away in whatever limboland that UFH now resides.

I would like to see the WFFA and WFA photos/information section take a priority in getting back up to speed here in Chief Delphi. If it is going to fall into the same limboland that the UFH has - then I think it is very sad. For example, our most recent WFA doesn't have a WFA recognition symbol/avatar (I don't know what they are called) in his profile.

.02,
Jane