Some of you may have read my previous posts about our endeavors to found the first and only FRC team in Greece. However, things are quite overwhelming right now.
A couple weeks ago, we lost our school’s support. The headmistress announced to us that the school will not open for afternoon meetings, because she does not have the time (and probably the interest) to come at school in the afternoon. Needless to say that she was supposed to be one of the team’s mentors and that most kids are now very disappointed and pessimistic about the future of the team.
Therefore, we are currently looking for two important things: a place to hold meetings and the money to pay the Registration Fee. Of course, we firmly believe that paying our registration cost is more urgent at the moment. On the bright side, last week we got a 1,200€ commitment letter from the States Scholarship Institute. Unfortunately, though, we did not get selected for the NI Grant.
Should you have any advice on how to deal with any of these issues, please send us your suggestions. Thank you so much for your time and we are looking forward to receiving your replies.
Best Regards,
Evangelos Kassos
Student Team Leader
Terminators Robotics Team 6839
Are you sure you have not already paid your registration fee? You might want to contact FIRST by phone and talk to the finance department to check on your team’s payment status.
Next important step, you need to have two mentors registered and passed YPP checks in order to complete registration. Is one of these two mentors your headmistress? Or can the two mentors that are registered for your team able to help your team?
Next important thing, find another place to build. Anyone on the team have space in their garage or homes to build? Any parents work for a business that might have a corner in a warehouse you could use?
Finally, try to repair the relationship with your school. Having a school team without school support is tough. If you can get that relationship back on track it will definitely help you in the long run.
Thank you so much for your immediate response. We checked again and our registration fee of 6,000$ and 600$ for the air transport of our KoP are not paid yet.
Our main problem so far was that we were not eligible to apply to grants form institutions like NASA or FIRST, as all of them required that our team was based in the US. Our last hope was the National Instruments Grant, but as I stated above we did not receive funding.
What are you proposing to do at the moment? Kickoff is only a month away and we do not have secured our registration.