Saw an old thread from 05 and wanted to bring something like it back up. So, what is your team motto? How did it come about? What’s the story behind it and does it really represent your team?
Ours has always been “FIRST we will be best, then we will be FIRST.” Mind you, this was our school’s motto before our own so I personally don’t feel anything when I hear it.
Something that we continuously brought up in Atlanta was team culture and I think the motto should represent your team.
I want to make our new motto “Doing what we do, and moving forward.” If you were at our team meetings, you would so understand its depth.
So, out of curiosity, I want to hear yours and the reasoning and depth behinds its words.
Our team motto this year was We Not Me.
It replaced a previous motto that no one really had an idea what it stood for called K.R.A.N.K. T.H.A.T. http://www.x-cats.org/images/wenotme_small.png
Before I joined 665 our motto was Getting Impossible Results, due to the highly random nature of results that come from our robots, and a combination of inside jokes.
This year, two years after our switch to the team name MAYHEM (Making Absurd Yet Highly Engineered Machines), we changed our motto over to It Works… In Theory. That motto is kind of the story of our team, we design and everything should work well, but something always ends up getting botched in the execution. Or we just get some result that can’t be predicted beforehand. So now when we talk about our ideas, we add the disclaimer, it works in theory.
TIMS doesn’t show any official motto for 1618, but Capital Robotics more or less purloined The Standard Is Excellence, a phrase first seen around the school with the former principal whose name escapes me. (The school has moved away from it for the most part; as the USC student, I’m always the last to know.)
Within the team, several catchphrases have developed. Tell anyone in the shop to act like they’ve got some sense, and someone will invariably chime in with “What would your grandmother say?”. The kids are still working on the Crank That Billfred (silently shaking one’s head back and forth in disapproval), but I doubt that one will be lighting up YouTube anytime soon.
Precision Guessworks had the motto “Seeing red again” as we returned our team colors to red and black. Between the mentors we also had a motto of “Exceeding the minimum requirements.”
