I actually had the complete opposite experience. I spent 9 years as a student hearing how far ahead FIRST was putting me, and I started to believe it. Once I got to college I realized I wasn’t ahead at all.
Do I see a first semester freshman complaining about how engineering school isn’t challenging? That’s precious!
What does this have to do with anything, at all? I’m not talking about your previous posts, I’m talking about that post.
So, yes, not only did I view it as a CONSTRUCTIVE way of putting it, I viewed it as a point in need of emphasis in that manner.
I think we have differing views on what constitutes “constructive.” I don’t imagine many people at all are going to react positively to that, moreover, it comes across as rather unpleasant and juvenile.
A big fish stops growing unless he finds a bigger pond.
A new mentor (no prior FIRST experience) pointed this out almost immediately after becoming involved in the program and I was a bit flabbergasted that I had never noticed. It’s shocking how often the message in speeches is “FIRST kids are special because they are in FIRST” and not “FIRST kids are special because they work hard” or some variation on the value of work ethic. Since that was pointed out to me I’ve been very careful with how I word messages to my students to make sure that I’m emphasizing that on our team we value working hard, not just having FIRST on a resume.
Come back once you’ve:
Built a college radio station from the ground up
Saved a robotics team from collapsing
Mentored a robotics team that became world champs
DJed multiple semiformals, campus events, and robotics competitions
Established a FRC Kickoff at your college
Built a FRC field for Kickoff, paving the way for them to build a community Robotics Center
Served on an offseason competition planning committee
Done 4 years of co-op including a thesis
Joined Greek Life
I was once a cocky freshman too, and it took the whole 4 years and then some to realize my limitations. If college isn’t challenging enough for you, you’re doing it wrong. You want a real challenge - do a suicide double-major, like Mechanical / Electric. Or just coast & see how little the “real” world is impressed by your coasting through college.
It sounds like you had a fantastic mentor on your FIRST team. In addition to the great suggestions already given for ways to challenge yourself, I would suggest finding a mentor at your university. I would suggest a grad student or post doc as they’re usually not as busy as professors, but seek out professors if you can’t find a grad student that you respect.
It’s great to get advice from online forums, but developing a longterm relationship with a mentor will give you someone who knows your position and progress and can give more specific suggestions what to pursue next. They’ll also be a excellent letter of recommendation when you apply for grad school or a job.
The only excuse for being bored is incompetence or laziness. Smart, motivated people find things to do and problems to solve. It’s a contradiction for both these statements to be true:
If none of this makes sense I’d suggest the solution Ether proposed.
Keep that in mind. 
What a weird disadvantage. You’ve taken advantage of a great opportunity and you’ve worked hard, and as a result, you currently know more than people who’ve never studied engineering.
I honestly struggle to see how this is a disadvantage. If the courses are really too easy, ask somebody if you can take harder classes. Could you sit down and take the final for the class you’re in right now, and get an A? If so, ask to take another class.
Sooner or later, you WILL get a wakeup. There’s a reason I took 5 years to graduate college, and that reason wasn’t my first year. It was my second year.
See, in the first year, most colleges like to get the general stuff out of the way. By the second year, you’ve still got some of the general stuff (but it’ll be spread-able through your remaining time), but you’ll start getting your major-specific courses. Or should I say, your major-specific “Weeder” courses–the type of courses that if you pass 'em, you should have a relatively simple time the rest of the way (and the concepts will stay with you), but if you don’t pass 'em, you may want to think about your career path. (Don’t forget to retake those courses!)
In my case, I hit Dynamics, Intro to Solid Mechanics, and Diff. Eq., 'long about the second semester of my second year. The only course I passed that semester was Physics II (and its lab). Insert retakes, and another year in college. I did manage to make my escape eventually, just not in the 4 years I wanted to.
So, just like everybody else: Go find something to do that ISN’T programming/robotics, and then go find something that challenges you in the programming realm. I hear some helicopters and quadcopters want to be programmed to find their way through mazes (don’t remember the competition, though)–that oughta keep you busy for a couple years or so.
Hey don’t knock my double major, it isn’t leading me to suicide it is leading me to a life of no one understanding my need for sitting in a dark quiet room for days at a time to let my brain rest. 
Latter first: statistics do lie, and your sample group (regardless of how large your former team is) is too small to make definitive statements.
Former second: I haven’t seen anything like that. I’ve seen bright kids get sidetracked by drugs and family issues, but never by robotics. I’m sure it happens occasionally but it’s not common, and likely has deeper roots.
I’m not sure if the CS will be a major, but it’s at least a Mechanical with Comp Sci minor for me. It’s actually a good combo, because some ME classes use LabVIEW, the ME math requirements (up through stats, diff eq, and linear algebra) are good for CS, and I have an internship writing mechanical engineering software. Non-overlapping majors are not necessarily suicide.
If you aren’t being challenged, push yourself. If you’re bored, find something new to do. If your classes aren’t challenging enough, take more. Take them in subjects that you aren’t an expert in (ie, not computer vision in your case). If your extracurriculars aren’t interesting enough, find new ones. Push yourself to explore and discover. Find a problem-- any problem-- try to solve it. Create something. Design a robot in CAD. Push yourself to where you think your limit is, and then just a bit more. Jump into the deep end of the pool. Get in over your head on a subject you don’t know much about.
When I was a freshman in high school, I was taking my calculus course at the University of Minnesota (where I am now studying), and one of my professors told all of us (a class of 7th, 8th, and 9th grade students) that no matter how smart we thought we were now, we would eventually hit a wall. Even if we could cruise through this program (which went from Calculus 1 through Multivariable, plus a potential for research/advanced classes by the end), if we were taking advantage of our talents to the fullest, we would eventually take a class, or work on a project, which would pose us a real challenge. The longer you spend cruising through life, the more difficult it is when you hit that challenge. That is when you learn to actually work. He also told us that working through that challenge, and the challenges that would come after it, were the meat of life.
I didn’t (and don’t) totally agree with him on everything, but that, out of all the things I learned about in the program, was one of the biggest takeaways. Personally, it took me from being a bored straight-A student to an A- to B+ student who was much more interested in life and what I was learning. I could have pretty easily slunk through high school with a 4.0 and a pat on the back (and believe me, I was on that path), but instead I took advantage of what I could learn.
Yes, I understand there’s a difference in scale here, but I think the general principle of what my prof told us that day still holds true: find your walls and get through them. Break them or climb them or tunnel under them. Figure out exactly what you are made of and then try to make yourself something more. Boredom isn’t a fate I would with on anyone, especially someone with the raw talent you appear to possess.
“A ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for.”
― William G.T. Shedd
To the OP, be careful how you phrase statements claiming to be far ahead of everyone else. This can come across as bragging, even if you don’t intend it that way, and will annoy people (for good reasons). See some of the previous posts in this thread for examples of annoyed reactions. Don’t dismiss these replies, though; I’m currently a first semester sophomore, and I can already tell that they’re giving the kind of valuable advice that only comes from experience. They’ve been where you are now, and they’re trying to prevent you from making their mistakes. The shear number of these replies shows how many people in FIRST are concerned for you and only want you to succeed.
I believe that in your case, your boredom might have less to do with being a FIRST alum and more to do with your professional and research experience. Not all FIRST alumni have this problem (myself included), and it sounds like you’ve had some fantastic experience already through not only FIRST, but also your Boeing mentor and undergrad research. Keep in mind that it’s quite rare to have had this experience, especially as a freshman, and it’s something most freshmen and sophomores would give almost anything to have had. This is a good problem to have, and many potential solutions have already been posted. I don’t want to repeat all of the advice in this thread, so I’ll just ask again that you consider following it.
Everyone else, let’s try to be no harsher than necessary. It’s hard to know what you’re taking for granted, and I think the OP is learning this.
There is a lot of valuable advice in this topic already.
Let me give you a different bit of advice that has served me well.
The general vector of most of a large number of these posts is do more…do…do…do…
The error underlying this situation is a misunderstanding of the value of your work and your labor. Mostly likely a vast misunderstanding of the value of sleep as well (trust me I’ve worked past the point of my own safety a few times sleep does matter and often when you least expect it).
Ask yourself something: what were you getting out of FIRST that you are not getting out of college that made that hard work worth it?
The value of education is not that number of classes the school could force you to take to justify their bottom line once you declare a major.
As others have said - colleges will often go real easy on you the first year or so then drive you into the ground. This is not just about getting the easy stuff out of the way - it’s a great business model to get you as financially invested as they can get you before they have to pay up on their end. Why do you think schools can’t often agree on what is transferable between them?
My advice to you is simply this. Use this time while the situation you are in has distracted it’s insanity away from you to find out what the real value of your time is. Personally I have told my students this before. I may mentor you in CNC programming but why would I suggest this is the best use of your time when I make significantly more professionally and most often do not use CNC machines to do it? I mentor it because I hope it enables my students to learn, contribute and participate. It empowers them. I hope it opens their heads to new ideas and so when they find themselves in those dark moments when they feel lost maybe they have some ideas on how to fulfill themselves.
I am a guy with an associate’s degree from a community college. My Father was a guy with no college degree. Our collective work has built key parts of this World’s infrastructure for more than 50 years and is undeniable.
FIRST is an opportunity, college is an opportunity and even war sometimes is an opportunity. I hope you can understand the difference between going through the motions and doing something you really value even if the rest of the World will spend it’s time telling you about your faults and limits and doing things that may not be in anyone’s best interest.
Engineering is not the only true path and trying to make one size fits all is bound to create negative consequences. The value of FIRST is that it encourages people to see what engineering can be to you before you get pulled back into a college system that makes the most money when you can not complete the programs but you convince yourself that you must have a degree. So you spend…spend…spend on student loans that might even survive you if you die young or in some tragic accident.
Work smarter - not just hard.
Cause slaves work plenty hard and they are still slaves.
So much blood has been spilled so you can have this opportunity to fulfill yourself, use it wisely.
“Then the joy of achievement when one can successfully take a few steps without falling. The appreciation of people around is a key component of achieving personal fulfilment. It is invariably followed by a sense of habituality (i.e. being able to perform any act e.g. walking, habitually). Then boredom. Followed by a yearning for the next horizon, whatever it may be for an individual.”
I know how you feel sometimes. It’s not a bad thing, but sometimes challenges are too easy. I joined the Formula SAE team, which is a lot like robotics in many ways, but different and more difficult in a good way. I am sure your school has one, I would check it out. And since I am on Formula SAE, I get to use the machine shop for ‘Formula SAE things only’ :rolleyes:
Anyways, story time.
We had to create a Lego NXT robot in our engineering 100 class, and that was fun, but also wayy to easy. We had to make one that followed a line (line sensor and a variant of a P-loop), pick up a ball, and put in in a bucket.
I ended up throwing away all the code, and used PID loops on both the drivetrain and the arm. I ended up doing all the work on the robot, but I didn’t mind the least bit. And needless to say, our (my) robot was the best by far
And you can tell the FIRST robotics kids from the other (as one of the programmers on my team says) plebs (plebeians). The FIRST kids excel at pretty much everything. 
In our MechE “100” class we had to do similar. Our robot had to follow a line on non-flat terrain, pick up some small PVC pipes, carry them through a tight tunnel, and dump them off. Our group (randomly assigned of course) consisted of entirely FRC and FTC alum by chance. We were given something like the last 5 weeks of the semester to build the robot (2x1hr classes per week). We finished on day 2, got our 100, and were done for the semester.
Seeing as we’re going there… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hG9tZ9O60dA
For reference, the rest of the competition was somewhat larger and took somewhat longer (the ones that didn’t have to be picked up mid-run or nudged back on-course). I’m not aware of any other FIRSTers in the class, though. (The team I was on had one ME, one EE, and one computer engineer/computer scientist.)
I’m a freshman in college too, and I can see where you’re coming from. After doing FIRST, I’m used to waking up at 7, doing 7 hours of classes, then 4 hours of FRC, then rushing through my homework in 2 hours to get in another 3 hours of CAD before bed. I became really ruthlessly efficient at getting stuff done whenever I had a free moment, and although I’ve become a bit more lazy since build season, my attitude is still definitely work first, fun second. I do my work efficiently and as soon as it comes out, and often find myself with a lot of extra time on my hands.
Even though I’m taking what a lot of people would consider really hard classes, my roommate and my friends sometimes jokingly ask me if I just never have homework. The reality is I already know a good fraction of the material, and know how to work efficiently. I am bored sometimes. I know where you’re coming from.
It sounds to me more like you’re burnt out rather than just too advanced for your peers. Try to do stuff in your major that you find fun, side projects and the like. Remind yourself why computer science is fun and worth spending your life doing. Doing that will probably make the intro courses a lot easier to sit through. Even if you already know the material, you can still learn the best way to teach it to other students.
If you really are just too too advanced, write a thesis and get a PhD. Then go out and get a professorship.