Sustainability In FRC Teams

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by eagle33199

...We assume that we can provide the influence to get kids into engineering in college, but we don't go on to support them once they are at an engineering school. We hand them off to professional engineering societies and let them proceed without us. They get involved with those societies and stay involved with them after they graduate.

What first really needs at this point is a college program. Something that can accommodate the students schedule with a longer, less intense build season that doesn't require 40 hours per week of work...

I can't quite see this as a positive idea. The bigger picture goal is to spread the FIRST culture throughout society, and keeping college-age students closely tied to FIRST would likely end up making them more insulated from the rest of the world. If we want to transform that world, the professional engineering societies need them more than FIRST does.

The way I see it, sustainability shouldn't mean keeping individuals in FIRST longer. It should mean giving teams the ability to survive even when specific individuals leave. It should mean giving them the ability to survive even when they lose specific sources of funding. It should be about team continuity, not about personal lifetime commitment (though such commitment can be a large help in making the rest happen).