just wondering what other people have been exposed to and done besides just attend competitions
My team has so far displayed our 2005 robot at a trade show, attended Fabtec trade show at McCormick place Chicago, and one of our sponsors is sending me and some other members to their annual trade show in LAS VEGAS yayy 
Got to spend an evening at Dean Kamens āWestWindā home (kickoff event) with about 2,000 of the coolest engineers and industry leaders in the country.
Outside of meeting a bunch of cool or crazy (or both) people, my involvement with FIRST led me to getting a job last summer (via a post on Delphi, of all things), and itās helped me make some sense of the classes I take as a business student. (Believe it or not, FIRST teams and businesses share more than a few traits.)
Itās also made me realize how much I enjoy travelāIāve been everywhere from three blocks down the road to Maine to Florida (twice) to Georgia to New Hampshire. (And someday Iām gonna make it to IRI, lest the midwest think Iām snubbing them )
Jump in car after an eight hour day of work and drive ten straight hours to Indiana without tellling your wife (well OK, I told her but she was 2000 miles away on an island so she couldnāt do anything about it. Itāll be interesting if I can pull it off this year). :rolleyes:
I was offered (and enthusiastically accepted) a job here. Iāve been invited back this summer, and they are our teamās main sponsor now as well, so everything has come full circle.
Iām on the same team and Iām going to Las Vegas too. And the same company thats sending us also hired me to make promotional videos for them.
I Finlay get to do professional work for a client! Who knows whats going to happen after that. Maybe 10 other companies will come knocking at my door asking for promo videos. 
FIRST isnāt the only contributor, but it helped me get an internship at NASA over the summer, and sure as heck helped me get into my top collegeā¦with a scholarship!
From our knowledge with FIRST control systems we entered an ROV competition and wonā¦take that MIT!!! I got enough scholarships to continue my education without paying for anything and Iāll have some pocket moneyā¦and I figured out what I want to do for the rest of my lifeā¦
I read the article about you guys in WIREDā¦ awesome! Where are you planning on going to school?
Every job that Iāve had to date has been in some way because of FIRST.
And Iām talking some good jobs - Environmental Tectonics Corp., SAIC, DARPAā¦
i got to hang around school and had to get admin privledges to use the easyC and other robotics related softwareā¦ its awesome
and i got to do vex and totally make the best ball harvester in the land
Well, for me, FIRST has been the main extracurricular activity, i spend so many hours on FIRST my 3 year old brother forgets my name sometimes.
Anyways, i have a question though, how do you guys apply to the summer internships or get jobs in a company over the summer?
Iām currently a junior in high school, the NASA internships were all for college students or students living near Goddard. My team doesnt have any sponsor at all, we raised the money the same way as last yearāby asking local businesses one by one, our school district is really unsupportive. Our team name doesnt bear the name of our high school but the Yolo County who gave us some money.
Any tips in finding a good sponsor for our FIRST team? Weāre at Sacramento, CA, not a lot of tech business there that might support us i think.
Any help appreciated
In a word Networking and not the computer kindā¦
networking with peopleā¦ to get a job you need to meet the right people, ask questions, and market and sell āYOURSELFā, if the company that is hiring (read this as the person in that role) does not understand you, or what your skills and experince and talents are, then you wonāt get an offerā¦
but the first step is to network with lots of people to find out about all the opportunities that are out thereā¦ and then chase them down!
YMHO, but is also is what works for me 
āMike
When it comes to schools and school districts, most are reluctant to shell out thousands of dollars for a group of twenty students at first. (No pun intended). When our team first started in 1999, we was told that if we would last at least successive seven years, then we would be considered a permanent part of our school district. This will be our eighth year in FIRST, and now, our townās Board of Education is now one of our two biggest sponsors.
Just last week, someone āfrom the top in downtownā had a contractor come in and wire 480 volt electricity for our lathe and milling machine in our new private machine room. We we told this was going to be a $8000 job, and it was donated to us for free. So good things come to those who wait. 
Try to get your team as much attention as possible. Just keep at it. Keep trying to get media attention in every way possible. Try to get lots of articles in school newspapers/websites/announcements/etc. Go out into the community often - bring your robot - and promote FIRST. The more exposure your team gets, the better. Get your students psyched about FIRST. Aspire to win awards at competitions. Have fun. Make cool DVDs of your team during the build season and competitions. Send these out to schools and companies to show them how much fun you really have.
Eventually all these little things will come back to help you. As your team continues to mature and grow and expand, your school district will recognize how much of an impact you are having. They will soon recognize that FIRST is really amazing, and is something that they can be really proud of. It is at this point that you will finally get generous support from your school. 
Now, back to our regularly scheduled programā¦
How do u guys go about finding these things for your robotics teams? The only thing my robotics team has done due to FIRST is go to the lego robotics. I would really appreciate any help with finding activities for my robotics team to do besides build and go to competitions.
Iāve been interviewed on one of our local t.v. channels as well as our whole build season being filmed by PBSā¦ itās pretty cool
One of the things I got to do because of FIRST was over the summer when a bunch of students on the team got to go to a training course for technicians of Allison Transmissions. It was called All Products Familiarization. In this we all got to see the factory workings and even a hybrid transmission for buses. This was one of the coolest things I got to do because Cyber Blue 234 has Allison Transmissions as a sponsor.
Last year as a rookie team one of my teammates and I drove two hours to meet with an animatronics expert
ā¦he ended up being an invaluable resource because he pretty much taught us all about pneumatics and how they could be implemented not only in our design but in the real world
ā¦he also had tons of toys to show off ( a full size raptor that could move and talk)
Another would have to been the times when we went to companies in the area that decided to donate metal to use and we ended up getting tours of their factory and learning how their product is made 
Bingo on the networking answer. At a competition event, there are TONS of very important people present. Listen to the judges being introducedā¦an awful lot are CEOs, vice-presidents, and managers. Strike up a conversation and youād be surprised at the opportunities that are presented.
For your first internship - and especially if you are still in high school - donāt expect to get paid much if at all. You donāt do internships for cash (although if you do a good job, it will start to pour in; Iām making a respectable wage for doing robotics/control systems programming all day!).
So to sum it up, find someone important and talk - donāt be afraid to ask about their company and inquire about internship positions. Donāt beg and grovel, but if you can make it apparent that you will be able to help a company out, they will quickly bring you in if they can. Still, some (mostly larger) companies have a more formal college-only (sometimes graduate-level only) internship policy. But it never hurts to ask.
After all, for what the average intern makes, the company is making off like a bandit 
One thing I got was access to cool software I always wanted but never could get my hand on. I was using the 30 day demo of milkshape and loved it yet it ran out, started using Blender but wasnāt a fan of it, then I started using MED. Which also stunk, finally I joined robotics and hopped on the animation team and scored a copy of 3ds. To say the least Iāve gotten better. Also this proved to my parents that 3d modeling wasnāt some hobby and that it can be turned into a career.