Application To Join A Team

[AdamHeard]

Sounds like your girlfriend's little brother should just join your team.

[JustAThought]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

Sounds like your girlfriend's little brother should just join your team.

If my girlfriends brother didn't live so far away from me, I would love for him to be apart of my team. He is a good kid, who does nothing wrong. I took him to a couple competitions and he loved them. Because he has other interests, his possibility of joining the team is shrunk.

I can see I have upset many people, that wasn't the purpose of this thread. Perhaps I am just another student, who came from a poor school, who saw something so amazing that I wanted everyone in this nation to be involved in, then I saw teams telling kids they can't join and that is what provoked it. I know my team, no matter the size, will never turn down students. We will continue to embrace them as they come and do whatever it is we must to accommodate the new demand.

[JustAThought]

As a edit in my wording of the grade policy.

I am in favor of that, if our kids cannot keep their grades up, they cannot miss class. It is important that they maintain at least a C in every class.

[Eaglesdrb]

Having read this I can only say I am just as appalled as you are. I feel that something like this is the opposite of what FIRST is supposed to be about and would actually discourage people from even wanting to join.

As for dismissing people it may be necessary to have a clause somewhere in your documentation that allows you to kick people out for certain reasons but nothing that excessive. To the best of my knowledge from 4 years in this club we only asked one person to not come back due to an incident involving a flying 2x4 and a bloody nose. Other then them causing complete mayhem or being unable to keep their grades up (at which point they should be allowed back once they fix the problem) there should be no reason to remove a kid from the team.

The fees are what I am most annoyed about here. Granted every now and then our team does have to ask parents to hand over a little cash to pay for hotels and such when we are unable to (small team and a nationals trip last year drained our accounts completely. We have since fixed the problem and doubled our sponsorship input =D) pay it out of the club account. And even then we never excluded a person from going because they can't pay and always brought everyone who wanted and deserved to go. But to pay simply to participate on the team i find absurd. One of the key ideas behind FIRST is to get kids out and talking to big name companies to generate sponsorship. It builds professional communication and was that definitely something I took away from the year I spent as CFO.

[Kevin Selavko]

I do believe that every kid should be aloud to try out a FRC Team, but they should be able to kick you off because of bad behavior. On our team we have a kid who constantly vandalizes our tools, robot, game pieces, desks, chairs, and walls with sharpie, paint, spray paint, superglue, and hot glue. But because we have a no cut policy hew has to stay. I don't think you have any idea how much of a pain it is to take off hot glue from your electronics board. Also his behavior antagonizes the other younger members to goof off too.
With the time commitment we are aloud to have one other competing interest such as a sport during the 6 weeks. We are also required to go twice during the week and every Saturday for those 6 weeks-its really not that long.

[JustAThought]

Originally Posted by Kevin Selavko

I do believe that every kid should be aloud to try out a FRC Team, but they should be able to kick you off because of bad behavior. On our team we have a kid who constantly vandalizes our tools, robot, game pieces, desks, chairs, and walls with sharpie, paint, spray paint, superglue, and hot glue. But because we have a no cut policy hew has to stay. I don't think you have any idea how much of a pain it is to take off hot glue from your electronics board. Also his behavior antagonizes the other younger members to goof off too.
With the time commitment we are aloud to have one other competing interest such as a sport during the 6 weeks. We are also required to go twice during the week and every Saturday for those 6 weeks-its really not that long.

That was bad wording on my part. Cut policies for behaviour and things of that nature are needed. However, cut because you have other things you do is just crazy. We have many students on our team who work, play sports and do this. If the kid is willing to work hard, they should not be punished.

[Karibou]

Originally Posted by JustAThought

However, cut because you have other things you do is just crazy. We have many students on our team who work, play sports and do this. If the kid is willing to work hard, they should not be punished.

That's all fine and dandy for your team. In fact, mine was very similar, in that as long as you showed up pretty regularly and didn't cause problems or slack off, you were on the roster. We did have to complete pre-season training and log a certain amount of shop hours to travel "with the team" to competitions, but it was overall pretty flexible.

Originally Posted by JustAThought (from first post)

To think I could have been cut from my team simply because I wanted to do other things is simply unacceptable.

There are two sports that we knew we had conflicts with, and students who wished to be involved with those were given the ultimatum of "us or them," because we knew, from past experience, that in the end both teams (and the student) suffered because of the student's split time. While I would rather not turn down a student because of time constraints, there are some occasions where it is the best way to go. I'll save my stories and examples, since there are already plenty given in this thread (necessary security clearance, school limitations, etc).


I feel as if I may know what team you're talking about, having both seen a lengthy application and talked to members of the team before. They had to add an application process because they didn't have the facilities, mentors, or teachers to support the amount of interest they were getting. Then again, I'm sure there are several MI teams that have this practice, and probably for the same reason. Not every team can run the same way, and I ask that you take a moment to consider that and be a bit more open-minded before you start claiming that there is a "right" and a "wrong" way to run a team.

[Tristan Lall]

Elsewhere on the Internet, I was reading about places that require applications to acquire a rescued dog. Although the conditions they set were reasonable individually, and the idea of a screening questionnaire was reasonable and even prudent, the particular mix of questions and the format in which they were presented was borderline offensive and almost assuredly counterproductive.

I think something similar is happening here. The team has legitimate interests, and probably has an extreme aversion to the kinds of risks represented by students with split commitments. It's just unfortunate that they feel their only defence is to be completely inflexible about it by insisting upon an onerous agreement.

I disagree with you (to some extent, at least) about a lot of the individual policies, but I think you've correctly identified a system that is flawed on balance.

[ttldomination]

I don't know what I can offer the OP here that others haven't already said.

I would perhaps highlight the fact that you have to start thinking outside of your box, especially if you're going to post on CD.

Take my team for example, this year, we pushed close to 30 regularly attending members. Our PR "squad" has been doing excellent work, and we're expecting anywhere from 20-30 new members next year. Now, we can neither sustain a team of that size (as of now) nor see fit to that kind of growth, so we're implementing a tiny application system to see what kind of students we're really getting.

Now, take the very innocent scenario above, and add a slightly more intense variables. A sustainable team of 45 or 50 regular members? An extremely successful program? I hope you can understand why applications serve the better interest of not only the current team, but also of the new members to eventually join.

- Sunny G.

[Tetraman]

For 174, it is the school's policy that students with a grade average of 69 or lower are not allowed in extracurricular activities unless they get proper signatures and approvals. Not the team's policy, but the school's. Part of FIRST is learning and succeeding in school. If your grades drop too low either during or before FIRST season (and trust me they do) then you are taking the team too seriously and not your school work - which should be taken just as or even more seriously. It makes sense to encourage students to continue to work hard in school as they attend 3-5 meeting sessions a week for robotics. And if one of those ways is to give them an ultimatum on being kicked out if their grades are too low, then have at it.

Our team dislikes an application process, and because of our high mentor count and time given to use the facilities, we use pre-season meetings and lectures to determine which students aren't taking the little things seriously, and then cutting based off of that. Not all teams have this luxury.

Anyway, everything is a learning process - think of the kinds of applications these students fill out for their part time jobs and how they can word things right to get the job or word things wrong to get overlooked.

tl;dr - Every team is different. Every team works with their own system and that system is going to be much different than your team's system. That doesn't mean it is wrong, it just means it is different.

[Al Skierkiewicz]

Every team that has been around for a while has a set of guidelines that works for them. It fits their projected team size, the school rules and population, the needs or resources of the sponsors, and the goals established by the team for the team. Although some ideas might be useful in your environment, they might not be in all teams.
For WildStang, we have long been a graded class in the District. It is considered a 'ninth period' class which can meet anytime outside of the normal school day. However, that also means you must register for the class, every year. Now that makes some implications that are out of our control...
1. You must participate to some minimum in order to receive a grade.
2. The grade you receive does affect your GPA.
3. In some cases, it may be best for a student to drop robotics in order to raise their grades in other classes or reduce the chance of receiving a failing grade.
4. All school rules apply, the District has a co-curricular code that is essentially a 24 hour/seven day policy for behavior even when not on a team activity.
5. There are certain grade minimums (both academic and team grade) to participate as pit crew, drivers or for travel team.
6. Students know their current grade (available on the school websites) everyday.
7. Our team size can be set by the District to what they believe is a manageable and realistic size.
8. Yes, there must be homework.

While I agree that we should strive to involve as many students as possible, it is a huge drain on the mentors of the program to do so. So all of us struggle with providing a balance of quality over quantity. We have migrated to a magic number of about 60 students and that fills everyone's needs and concerns. We have almost 30 mentors and teachers so that allows us to have students in specific roles/sub-teams. Smaller teams must have students work on several projects at once, i.e. Chairman's Award, animation, safety, strategy, PR, fundraising, etc.
If a student can somehow manage to participate in another activity and meet the minimums for grade on the team, we accept that. Currently about half of our students participate on a team, church activity, scouts or music. Many of them participate in fall sports even though we meet all year round so they can spend time during build season. On the electrical team alone, I have multiple students in band or orchestra (some in honors), one on the swim team, one on water polo, one in band and three other school projects, several on track or cross country or both, three working after school, and two heavily involved in church/temple. More than half of the mechanical and electrical teams are taking one or more AP classes. What is surprising is all of these students are exceeding class and team minimums, all are on travel, pit crew or drive team.
The beginning of this season, more than 115 students somehow were allowed to register. We had to cut students for the first time, ever. We were very up front about the plans at the first meeting in August. Everyone was told that there would be an essay, a series of evaluations, observations and participation tracking that would go into the decision that would take place in mid November (mid term). So we looked at grades, homework, participation, essays, etc. And for most it was easy. Nine students didn't hand in any essay, some wrote only a few sentences so they didn't meet the minimum requirements, some missed multiple homework assignments, some had missed more than half of the classes, some had grade problems, some even told us they didn't have the time and would quit anyway. The remainder became heart wrenching to determine. I don't want to go through that again. The lead teachers interviewed each student prior to the final decision. For the majority of students they felt is was just and they would try harder next year. If we had the funds and maybe a few more mentors and teachers, we would love to have a second team.

[rsisk]

Just had to comment...

Originally Posted by Al Skierkiewicz

...For WildStang, we have long been a graded class in the District.

...We have migrated to a magic number of about 60 students

...We have almost 30 mentors and teachers so that allows us to have students in specific roles/sub-teams.

Are there many other classes in high school that can say that?!? 30 mentors/teachers for 60 students.

Just tell me that FIRST has not created something special.

And now back to the OP topic.

[Ed Law]

I love that Google translator. Very funny.

I know many of you are very passionate about this topic. I am too. I know you spent a lot of time to type in your well thought out response for the benefit of the OP. However I am going to ask the moderator to delete this thread. It is black and white that the OP violated the rules by creating a new account without team number and posting things like this. Keeping this thread is encouraging people to continue to do that in the future.

Is there a way to keep the excellent comments from others and just delete the posts from the OP? I would propose we start new threads to discuss specific things like Team fees and other team policies. Every team faces issues and there are multiple ways to deal with it. We can all learn from each other and put appropriate policies in place so we can put our energy into improving our program instead of dealing with energy draining issues.

[JuliaGreen]

The Killer Bees have used an application and interview process for many years. One reason we do this is to get to know the students better - we know how the team functions and we know what type of skills we are looking for. We do this every year - returning and new students. We do exit interviews for our seniors.

Sometimes, students want to join the team because they think colleges are looking for "extra-curricular" involvement. Sometimes they want to join the team to get some extra days off of school when we travel. Sometimes they want to join the team because a significant other is on the team. The application and interview process tends to help them decide this is not the place to improve your resume, sleep schedule or relationships. This year, we had students who originally were interested in the team because of these reasons - and some of them really, really like STEM now that they have done cool stuff with the Killer Bees.

We also have students on varsity basketball teams in the winter. These students have to make the hard choices about what comes first (no pun intended!). There were days during build season where they did a full day of school, a full practice and then a full team meeting. Homework was done between classes, at lunch, in the car and late at night. As these students became more involved in the Killer Bees, they are re-considering what comes "first". As with any team, if you don't show for practice, you don't show on the floor or field. You show up on the bench.

We have fees to be on the team - siblings on the team pay 50%. The fees are enough to cause a person to think about what is important. And we don't turn students away because they can't pay the fee. We make it work.

To quote our friends from 51 " You get out of this what you put in to it" - Great Life Lesson for all.

Julia

[KeatonM]

Many teams in Michigan - and beyond - that I know of (My team, Team RUSH included) use applications to separate those who will be dedicated, motivated, and timely, from those who are not. We also have interviews, after the application process.

If Team RUSH accepted every student who said they "might be interested" or had an "I guess so" attitude, we'd be far past our typical - and ideal - 30 to 35 students.

RUSH is not a robot only team. We meet year-round for fundraising, teambuilding, presentations to sponsors, and more - including the summer, when we host our annual Regatta - a cardboard and duct tape boat race that also serves as out #1 fundraiser, new student learning opportunity, and training.

I do understand your post saying that nobody should be turned away - and I agree - but with an added "if they are committed."

Also, I do understand your stance on dues and fees to participate. RUSH has a pretty hefty amount that each student must bring. In addition to that amount, our school considers RUSH a school club, so we pay the additional school club fee. But something you have to realize, is that FIRST isn't the cheapest thing to do. Our budget is in increments of $10,000, and in today's economy, getting sponsors and donors isn't always easy. So we have dues, to offset that huge budget. Our regatta last year raised ~$25,000 - not even half our yearly budget, and although we raise more every year, we also rely on a network of sponsors (over 100, if you include those who donate through the Regatta) to raise our budget. And it starts over every year.

For the time commitment, there is a vast difference in some teams time requirements. RUSH requires every student from 3pm to 8pm, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday during build season. In addition to those mandatory meetings, we have 'advanced build' meetings Tuesday, Thursday, late Friday, and much of Saturday. We only have about half of our team working directly on the robot, with the other half on the business teams. Because of this, we need these extra meetings to make sure the robot gets done by week 6.

I guess my overall thought is this: If you want to join a team, and don't want to spend 100+ hours there, find a team that doesn't require 100+ hours. Every team is different, and there are teams that require less time. Applications are good to sort through students.