I was a student for four years and I am now a junior at a local university mentoring the same team in my spare time. There are students on my team that spend every night of the week and most of the weekend at the shop, they are constantly asking mentors to stay late and work a bit longer to get a bit more done before our next competition. FIRST inspires them to work as hard and as long they can because they know they will be rewarded for it.

It really grinds my gears to see students and mentors on other teams tear them down and disparage their achievement as something the adults on the team did. Stop by our pit and ask them about our robot, ask about our vision tracking or motion profiling, they can explain it much better than I can.

As for "class traitors" or "California CEO's" I don't have much to say other than FRC takes a heck of a lot more than a few professional engineers giving the students a CAD model to build or whatever your think is going on in the top teams shops. My team has 3 build mentors and 3 additional college alumni mentors (including me), this years students are the one of the strongest group our team has ever had and together our team created this. Personally, (I might be a bit biased) I see at some similarities in design choice and aesthetic to this, this,this,this,this, and that. The teams I linked are inspirations to me, I want my team to rise up and compete at their level not pretend they have some insurmountable advantage and give up.

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