Collegiate FIRST competition

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by Akash Rastogi

That's a pretty harsh statement there, Chris. Especially coming from a kid who talks about VEX robots all the time and wanting to have a team....

I do want to have a VRC College Challenge, but I've never even once thought my VRC College team would ever inspire anyone to pursue engineering as a career. It would just be a fun thing to do. Do you seriously think I'd be able to inspire anyone at RPI to change their major by being in VRC? To be perfectly honest I don't understand what you mean at all.

The reason I said what I did is because nearly any student that could be inspired by FIRST has already decided whether or not they are going into STEM by the time they enter college. No one goes to MIT or Caltech to major in English, and I've never heard of an incredibly successful engineer who went to Harvard. FIRST is about inspiring students to pursue science and engineering as a career. The way FIRST does this is by giving the students a challenge and a complex problem to solve, hopefully working with some awesome professional engineers on the way.

I understand the sports analogy, but I don't think a college program would inspire any more students to pursue engineering than something like Battlebots would. For a college program, the inspirees are all watching from a distance. They do not interact with the program at all. If you're aiming for a competition that's so incredible to watch that people go "man, I want to do that! How can I do that???", why have a program for college students with no funding base and no foundation when the existing Battlebots program has already been around for years? Battlebots is even televised.

The reason I react so strongly against this, though, is because I can't exactly see a way that this wouldn't take funding away from FRC teams. Colleges in FRC who want to do this would have to come up with thousands more dollars, so I bet more than a few would go "well we don't need to support that OTHER FIRST thing anymore". Any corporate money going to this would probably be better spent on new and sustainable FRC teams, which have a much higher "inspiration quotient" per team than any college team.