Talking to some of the senior mentors, I joked(and hoped) that a college level FIRST would be made(after college though, I’m ready to just be a volunteer and a mentor-I’m just having too much fun being the driver, programmer, elelctronics, and etc. for my team.). They said how FIRST was thinking about it. If it is or if it was to happen, cool thought though to have schools like Texas Tech against MIT in the world of FIRST.
Plus it would be a great way to create interest in students to go to certain colleges.
While it would be fun just to be able to compete on a team, I would hope that FIRST would run it like many lego league competitions. Where the build season and competition would end before FRC Kickoff. Other wise teams myay lose some mentors.
Freddy actually brought this idea up about a year ago. You may find some of the posts in thisthread helpful
It seems like a nice idea, but there is a robotics competition at the college level, only it’s run by DARPA, not FIRST (the president of DARPA made a speech about the Grand and Urban Challenges during the elimination matches). While it isn’t the same idea as the FIRST competitions, it looks like it employs many of the same principles alumni would have learned as team members. I know that one of our team’s mentors participates in this, and he still frequently manages to help out the team, so the two events can coincide without a team losing too much mentor time.
Or… you can put all your creative and thoughtful energies into mentoring and being involved with local FRC/FVC/FLL teams and help inspire those students. 
As the old quote goes, “All good things must come to an end.” By the time you graduate, you must now realize that your role in FIRST is no longer to be the inspiree, but the inspirer. Help mentor a team. Get involved and volunteer. Start new FLL/FVC/FRC teams. Remember the ‘glory days’ of your high school years in FIRST, but don’t try to relive them. You’re in college now, and now it’s your turn to give back to FIRST and inspire the next wave of FIRSTers.
After all, by the time you reach college level you should have already been inspired. 
Speaking of college level FIRST, Purdue University has Purdue FIRST Programs, one of the strongest college FIRST organizations. Not only do we mentor the three local FRC teams, but we run the FLL qualifying tournament and provide the backbone that allows the Boilermaker Regional to happen every year as well. The organization is completely student run. Some have FIRST experience, many do not, so we are still looking to inspire new students every year. We work with the students to help them learn as much as possible, but they do the work, it’s their team and their robot, and that’s how it should be.
I was my team’s driver for two years, so I can sympathize with those seniors who are not quite ready to give up the controls. I was lucky enough to get two more chances to drive robots: one in MIT’s 2.007 contest (formerly Prof. Flowers’ 2.70), and one at the International Design Contest in Tokyo. But I can say that after three years of mentoring a FIRST team as a college student, I enjoy doing that much more than I enjoy designing/building/driving robots. It’s a different experience, and it takes a while to realize your new role. (There are several great threads about this transition that you can read, but I’m too tired to find them right now.)
If you are still aching for the chance to compete, there’s always DARPA, FSAE, Battlebots, RoboCup, AUVSI UAV, and the North American Solar Challenge, to name a few. Check your college’s student club/team directory.
How I miss driving the robot… How I miss driving the robot… How I miss driving the robot.
Heh… I was talking to my partner in crime, Ryan Damewood, about the good ol’ days when we drove the robots between 2002-2005. We had dominating drive teams but only once did we have a robot that was capable of doing an immense amount of scoring (2005).
Yes, I live in the glory days. I tried coaching last year, but I’m not really cut out to be a coach I guess. I’m not pushy enough to strategize with other teams and students don’t really take me seriously. It didn’t help that my brother was a driver and I had to cut him because he wouldn’t listen to me and tried to bicker with me at every chance he could.
I’ve said this before, as have many others, but college FIRST is a bad idea.
You’re going to take college students who are mentoring FRC teams, or might be mentoring FRC teams away and give them their own competition. There is no advantage to this. The point of the competition is to inspire, and college students have already been inspired. If they have not, they probably won’t take part in the competition anyways.
The only thing it’d be doing would be to let college students relive the glory days of driving robots.
Yeah, you’re pretty much right on the dot with that one. I would just like to drive the robot in a couple of matches. Heck, this year was the first time we did swerve drive and no one would let me even try to drive it around K-T… made me sad.
Cory is 100% correct here. I agree having a college level FIRST would just let college kids relive their glory days.
However, I must say that FIRST drops the ball when it comes to college students. Does something magical happen that summer between senior year of high school and freshman year of college? OF COURSE NOT! You don’t come back after that summer with the knowledge and experience of an adult engineer. I know my team (125) has exactly 1 adult mentor, and he is our faculty advisor from Northeastern university. Other than that its all college kids. We’re not always sure what we’re doing, and we’re not always sure that we’re doing the right thing and being ideal role models. College kids have a much different FIRST experience than any other level of FIRST participant.
I think college kids should start to look upward. There are A LOT of other competitions where its perfectly fine for a college level student to be the “driver” or participant, and this doesn’t mean you need to stop mentoring FIRST high schoolers.
When did anyone mention college students stop mentoring high school students? I believe it was stated that it would be nice to not have the two competitions coincide with FRC, only compliment. I certainly wouldn’t stop mentoring 648… however, I am going to be stepping away from 648 more and moving into the FVC scene more…
On another note: Some people don’t look forward to dealing with immature high school students that don’t hardly listen to people of authority and/or higher experience levels. I know this is my major drawback of being a mentor of 648. However, it doesn’t really deter me too much because I get more out of mentoring than I do not mentoring… if that makes any sense at all.
EDIT: After reading Brandon’s post a second time, I could have been totally mistaken. Please, tell me if I am.
I would really like to be able to continue designing robots for FIRST.
I’ll be coming back to mentor my team next year, but while I’ll offer design advise, and teach them about various topics, I can’t design the robot for them. While there are other robotics competitions that are open to college students, I don’t believe any of them will be able to replicate the experience I’ve had at FIRST.
I agree totally… I’ll be helping with building a DARPA Urban Challenge vehicle over the summer, but that’s definitely not going to reach the level of excitement I had when I was a student in FIRST. Besides, everything is autonomous, I like complete control. 
All of the AUVSI (IGVC , IARC , UAV and AUV) , Robocup , IEEE Regional Robotics Competitions, Firefighting, and NASA robotics competitions are all great opportunities. Although, the majority of these competitions can’t hold a candle to FIRST’s size, excitement and overall organization. These competitions have a long history with many challenging problems for students to solve. Robocup is great for computer science because the hardware does not change from year to year, many of the AUVSI competitions are very interesting for robotics fans because they are looking closer at the commercial needs of the robotics community.
I’ll agree with you on that point. I have yet to find anything in college that compares to FIRST. It’s hard to keep that level of excitement when you get into the college-level details of engineering. (A fault of the colleges more than anything else; their educational system is obsolete when compared to FIRST.) Let me stop before I begin to rant…
I think you missed what i was saying…i was trying to point out that one can participate in other competitions AND still come back and mentor FIRST high schoolers.
Okay, thanks. I had second guessed myself after reading your post again. That was the same point I just tried to make.
The problem that I see with DARPA, is that it seems to be mostly focused on electronics and programing, which doesn’t leave much room for a mechanical guy like me, and there are no arms, I like to build arms.
I think College FIRST would be awesome, the level of difficulty would be higher, but their ideas could really make highschoolers gather strong ideas from there superiors other than the mentors.