Me monday morning at school:
:ahh: I suddenly realize i have a paper due! (on internet) Copy and paste! copy and paste!
Try 18 credits of college (sophomore), two jobs, robotics, and then home work.
If it needs done, I either don’t get much sleep or I hand it in partly finished/to the best of my ability.
Right now I have nearly every hour of the day booked.
Well, back to seeing what HW needs done or shall I do more robot stuff?
It helps that our district has finals/midterms at the end of 1st semester instead of the beginning of 2nd semester, and that we have all new classes at the start of 2nd semester (block scheduling), so everything tends to be relatively easy at least the first week or two.
Mainly, work as much as possible during class (this work can be on homework or on robotics work that you will have to do anyway) and don’t waste this time and talk like you might at other times. Try to balance out which homework you do for which classes (don’t do all in one and fail another), but in the end sometimes you will have to sacrifice having the A in the class (at least for now) for robotics. Remember, there are still 3 months after build season to get your grade up, just don’t let it drop too far (I know our school won’t allow you to do any outside activities, including robotics, with a failing grade, and our mentors will force you to do homework once you approach failing until the grade is up higher). I don’t know how much sleep you’re used to, but expect to get less; I always get 6 hours or less a day anyway, so robotics dropping it to 5 or 4 doesn’t affect me much.
So, the choice is up to you, just make sure you are okay with what happens from your decision.
During the build season, I will admit that I usually cram in all my homework literally in the five minutes between classes. I also almost never study for tests, and I spend all of my study hall playing around in CAD or surfing ChiefDelphi instead of doing homework. I am one of those students who likes to sit on the back of the class. Half the time I never pay attention in class either. School bores me. But robotics, that is really interesting. 
Last year, I only studied for ten minutes for one of my seven final exams. :ahh: I am taking all Honors-level classes, except for AP American History. And yet, I still recieved A’s on every single one of my finals. I have a solid 4.4/4.5 GPA, and I have at least an A average in every class except English, where I have a B+ average. (If it was not for the fact that I have partial photographic memory, I wouldn’t be able to do this.) :yikes:
I spend probably close to an hour a day on ChiefDelphi. I also am the only webmaster for my robotics team, and usually do about an hour or two into working on that every day. (Right now, I am working on begining to write a PHP-backend for it). I also attend up to and over thirty hours of robotics meetings per week, in addition to the time I spend at school ‘learning’.
I also try to spend about at least a few hours per week toying with ideas in Inventor. Somehow (eg. lots of Mountain Dew and Mountain Dew MDX), I’ve trained myself to be able to stay awake to 2-3 AMish every night*, and still wake up at 6 AM feeling refreshed and readany minutes of work as possible out of it.
You probably cannot get much more productive than I am right now. 
*Okay, so I sleep until noon on Sundays. But that may change soon when our team decides to start meeting on Sundays again.
Like many of you have said, it really comes down to time management. I go from school to whatever E.C. (violin lessons, chamber strings, chess club, risk club, or tennis) I have that day to dinner and back to robotics. If I don’t have anything after school on a certain day, I go straight home and work on homework from about 2:30 (we get out at 2:15 and I live very close to school) until 5p.m.
With finals coming up this week, many of the older students, including myself, have been only staying at robotics till 8 or 8:30 at the latest. Luckily, my block schedule is so messed up this semester that I have two separate 45-minute study periods and 25 minutes of lunch to work on either leftover homework or extension courses. Next semester, I go from 4 courses at school to 3 (I drop two honors classes for one more AP so I have just AP Physics, AP Chem, and Orchestra Honors) and pick up another extension course (I teach myself Calculus III and German IV-Honors) to get the necessary language credits. With this scheudule, I will have over 2 hours of “free time” in the morning to catch up on robotics, but the vast majority of that time will be spent completing my other 2 classes.
Another thing to watch out for is sports-related interference. We have had a few students drop sports to join robotics, and a few drop robotics to join sports…and I got cut from one of my sports for being in robotics…
Either way, make sure that the coaches know that you may be missing time in a spring season to travel and compete!
Aw man! Managing? heh. No such thing for me…I know it’s important but I TRY to do my during class/lunch, but if I can’t finish during lunch or class, then I take a break while at the meetings, and do my homework (like 1/2 an hour 'ish). As for exams…well…I went home early for the past couple of nights and studied. In general, my marks tend to go down during the build season :S
I’m a 4.0+ student and fortunately this year I’m not getting much homework yet. We have midterms around the time of our regional. It helps to be well liked by teachers (sometimes I’ll miss an entire school day) but the work always builds up. Fortunately we’re starting to get the hang of it so just try to stay on top of the work, it still gets hard to do when we get home around 7 pm every day.
If you don’t want to fail or build a horrible robot. You will just need to stay up late. I dont reccomend slacking during 1st block, especially with Tests.
My grades get it bad during build season.
I have it worse than many on my team, with Lacrosse and Ultimate Frisbee along with robotics.
I eat whenever given the chance, and sleep sparingly.
I have now decided i need to finish my already late notes on Slaughterhouse-Five, and get off CD before i spend another night without doing any homework whatsoever.
I just do homework whenever. I feel as long as i get it done the night before it is due, i am good. That way it is at least done. I’d prefer going to robotics over school. Especially since i am on the animation team. I spend more time on that than i do robotics.
artdutra##, you are not the only person who is the sole webdeisginer on your team.
what i have to do, is manage my time as eficiently as possible.
3:00 - get home, talk to freinds, get ready for homework
3:30 on- do homework
whatever time is left before 7- web designing, Cad, Forums, ET, More chatting.
7 - 9: robotics
9-on: solve webdesing and coding issues with dad.
11-2AM: go to bed…
and then it continues…
it is seriuosly very difficitl and strict to manage such a busy schedule (even tho i realize it is nowhere as near as busy as some of yeh guys), but i live with it. u just gotta realize when you have free time, and use it to the best of yer ability.
For me, it really all depends on the homework;
If it is worth points, or in a subject I know I need to study for (APBIO generally demands a bit of a chapter review), I get it done. Otherwise, it goes on the pile of “I should really review this before finals” handouts. Last year I put in about 50-60+ hours a week on the team (thats what I get for having a team leader/founder as a dad) during the build season, but I was also taking college courses and independent studies, so the homework situation was handled by just not sleeping. I have it easier this year, because I am only putting in about 20-30ish hours a week(back in public school, about an hour away from the team by train…ugh!), and the end of the semester is a week from tomorrow, and I’m a senior. I dont study for my tests in most subjects because I dont need too, and if I need to I can generally get extensions by explaining to my teachers that I was up until 3am working out the kinks in a telescoping arm or a particularily buggy piece of code.
Basically, do the homework if it is important. FIRST is awesome at getting you into college, but grades are more awesome at accomplishing the same task. If you know you will be pulling a late/all nighter, talk to your teachers; you will be suprised at the number of people willing to accomodate you if you are responsible and ask for the extra time BEFORE the project/homework/paper is due, and dont do it every time. Sometimes you need to tell your team leader you need to go home an hour early, no matter how hard it is.
Just remember that both FIRST and School are pretty important in most of our lives, and that a happy medium can be reached. One thing I’ve found is that you can generally find extra time in the day, on dinner breaks during robotics meetings, or by not going home after your meeting and reading your favorite web comic/gaming/chatting/making phone calls/browsing chief delphi/whipping up a CAD drawing of that new robot part you just thought of.
Grades suffer, as a rule, but be aware and sensible and you should be good.
you gotta play the system, especially in public schools, u can find loopholes in any class, even AP’s, by the beginning of build seasan i understand every aspect there is to know about each and every class, understand teachers personalities and how they would react to certain events, etc… i seriously do research on how to do as little work as possible and get an A in the class. You can miss homework assignments and do well on tests for a test-dependent class and do hw assignments and not study for a hw-dependent class for example. 
I’m spending in excess of 6-8 hours per day on robots, and more on weekends, so it’s tough to balance that and taking 15 units of classes.
I try to get as much done during random free blocks of time that I can, as well as using any days off as wisely as possible.
At my school none of my teachers give me any slack, and since all my classes are either advanced or AP, it’s rough.
Pretty much internet gets chopped off my schedule and you’re always tired.
On our team we have a few teacher mentors, and our team is super serious about keeping your grades up. If you need any help you can bring it into a meeting and if there is a moment they - or some other member - will help ya.
Speaking of homework… I should be doing some right now… :ahh:
well from between homework, school, robotics, and the included job, many things go unanswered. you cant really plan a schedule, many late nights will occur without warning. me for instance, im about to quit working so i can do robotics. its hectic at this time right now. im just letting things take the path least expected, and just following the river. its my third year and last as a student, so im not gonna overwork and fall under the radar, something has got to give, and for me its work.
Lucky for me I don’t get too much homework assigned and if I do, I do as much as I can at home and do the rest in my first period study hall Lucky me
During my Highschool years I lucked out and always had enough time during the school day to get homework done before I ever left the building. If there was anything that I didn’t get finished at school then I would usually end up doing it at our shop before I started working on anything robotics related. From others I’ve met here at college, the amount of actual homework I had during highschool was pretty much slim to non compared to most people also,so that helped a little.
That’s kind of what I do. I try to finish up as much hw as possible during my classes so I have time for robotics. In fact, I do that all year. It’s just that much extra time you are gaining. I personally like to get a good nights sleep so I’d rather not sit up and do homework. And it is hard to squeeze in homework while concentrating on the class going on but I do so. Warning: Use this technique at your own risk. It’s not everybody’s cuppa chai.
Robotics is part of a class at my school, a couple, actually, so, I generally have very little homework during the robotics season. It’s nice.