Well, our school’s college counseling department decided to hand out printouts of the FIRST scholarship website to all the juniors. Our school is OBSESSIVE about getting into college… its crazy.
So is it good that we’re prolly gonna have alot of new members next year? or is it bad that most of them aren’t here for robotics and are here for college?
well, i guess we caught someone’s attention… :ahh:
You should have made this a pole. I vote bad. FIRST, get them in FIRST for FIRST, then let them know about the scholorships. 
I personally don’t think you’ll have to worry about people there being for the scholarship money since most people know that you have to be highly involved to get a scholarship and you can’t just get one by joining. If anything, you might have to worry about people joining just to boost their college applications.
You can never really judge people on what you think their motives are. I’m sure some people thought that I joined robotics for my college application since I was involved in everything else at school too but hey, I like keeping busy and organizing the team was something that I thought was fun, especially since so many of my friends were on the team. Not to sound cocky, but if I was turned down because I didn’t seem all “hard-core…yeah, let’s build stuff” the team would have lost a valuable asset since I was there every day for hours and helped in my own way immesnsely.
I think as long as you make it clear how much time you’re expecting people to devote to FIRST and hold them accountable to that, than it should be fine. And even if someone entered for the wrong motives, if they’re working there everyday then you could really change a person’s point of view and they could become really passionate too.
You can never judge someones motives. It may turn out that they really love the program.
Case and Point? Myself.
My freshman year I joined because a friends brother was on the team and I heard the team went to Disneyworld. I looked at FIRST as a blow off class with a trip to Disney (after seeing the Rookie All-Star robot held together with duct tape and wire ties).
This season, I drove 80 Miles every day to be on my FIRST team, (~40 each direction) because I love the program.
Also many FIRST scholarships are to a specific school for an engineering major.