Stay or Not

[princessnatalie]

FIRST is the best thing that has ever happened to me.

However, I was in the same boat as you last year, during my 2nd semester as a sophomore. I had a lot of other personal issues going on in my life and I had to make decisions as to what I could and couldn't handle. This is a big part of high school, and life, and I wish I could've learned my limits earlier, because my GPA suffered immensly because of time management, lack of motivation and personal issues.
As a junior, I know that school comes first, but I could personally never leave my team because of my grades. My parents and I decided that if my grades fall I can't be as involved in robotics, and for me that was enough motivation to keep my grades up.
FIRST has taught me so much more than anything I learned in the classroom. It taught me how to deal with people, how to build robots and (as cliche as it sounds) it taught me to be a better person. The thing with my team, is we are so close, we are family, and I have figured out so much about who I am because of FIRST.

In the end, grades come first. But for me, FIRST was too valuable to miss out on. If I wasnt on my team, I believe I would be struggling more with my grades and my life.

[Graciebot]

I know what you mean about time management -___- Sometimes it gets very difficult to take on so much. See if you can spend a little more time doing your homework and then go to robotics when you are done, that's what I do. Because even if you do amazingly in FIRST, colleges aren't gonna look at you if your grades are suffering, and then all your hopes and dreams of becoming an engineer will be crushed and that is very sad So learn how to balance time, but stay with the team! It's super fun

[LightWaves1636]

I would say stay and learn how to manage your time wisely. We have students on our team in band, drivers ed, STEM school, and etc. but the one thing we enforce on the team is for students to get school work done and then they can work on the team. FIRST is about sending students to higher education that revolves around science, technology, engineering, and mathematics and allowing your grades to suffer due to FIRST defeats the purpose and mission of FIRST. We even had a talk with our team to take advantage of opportunities like this Princeton Review Class for the SATs. The Princeton Review students have been doing fine tackling that class and FIRST at the same time and if they end up spending all of robotics studying then so be it, we work really hard to not depend on one student alone.

The culture on our team is that it's not just a few students who carry the weight but the entire team pitches in equally and when they can and it's paid off quite nicely, I'm overly excited to see how well they'll do at Lone Star .

From my experience, I decided to not do this internship back in high school and do FIRST instead and right now I'm happy with that decision because I knew back then I'll end up in an engineering career anyway and the actual job is going to be more rewarding than the internship itself and the thing is I'm really happy I now mentor and volunteer a lot but I'm still grateful that I had that moment in time where I was a student of FIRST, it gave me so many life skills that I'm so happy that I learned to pick up before I got tossed into the real world.