<p>How impressive is it as an extracurricular? What if one holds a leadership position?</p>
<p>Is it worth the time commitment if I just want to pad my app legitly?</p>
<p>Also, can I get scholarships through FIRST?</p>
<p>well anyone can join FIRST and not too difficult to have leadership position, and in itself it’s nothing but with a whole picture it will help tremendously</p>
<p>You should do it if you like it. Don’t do it if it’s just to pad college apps.</p>
<p>
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<p>Quoted for Truth.</p>
<p>Some schools do have scholarships for FIRST students. There might be a list somewhere on the website.</p>
<p>the first website does have a place where they list for scholarships</p>
<p>Having founded our schools first robotics club, I would recommend only doing it if you’re interested in engineering. After the kickoff we usually end up meeting 15~ hours a week, so if you’re not interested it would be boring I would assume.</p>
<p>Edit: There are huge amounts of scholarships for schools, however, most of the scholarships I’ve seen are for subpar schools.</p>
<p>and then the upper ones are needs-based.</p>
<p>If you are doing FIRST to “pad” your app, you will quite possibly find it to be hellish. If a design fails (which happened all the time) you have to come up with new ideas and work on deadlines. I remember going to school on a Saturday morning once. Also, competitions are lame and boring as heck (at least they were to me). And no, it is easy to get a leadership position in any school club. As others have said, only do it if you are interested.</p>
<p>@Splonk
Our team spent every single Saturday during build season working…and no, the competitions are certainly not boring…almost everyone I know–my self included–involved in FIRST considers it their favorite activity by far.</p>
<p>As far as its value on a resume…there are awards for web design, animation, CAD, etc. on regional and national levels that look nice. And if you do any sort of project–camera tracking, t-shirt cannon, or anything–it’d make a great essay topic. Any national award–team or individual–should also be impressive.</p>
<p>Scholarships…you won’t find many for top tier schools, but they are very accessible for solid schools like RPI and BU.</p>
<p>The awards are meaningless but look good - just about everybody wins ‘something’</p>
<p>I wish I could the FRC competition… my school is broke… and we only have Vex and FTC.</p>
<p>The programming for FTC can’t even be called programming. It’s so easy.</p>
<p>And we’re broke, and the only schools with FRC are far out, and our coach who’s biased won’t let anyone go out to there.</p>
<p>Depends on the competition.</p>
<p>@daem0n
Speaking from an application perspective, yeah most of the team regional level awards won’t do a thing. Regional winner / chairman’s might be worth a little. But national awards competing with thousands of teams…def. worth something.</p>
<p>@MIT
I thought that FTC or maybe VEX was known for having longer autonomous periods, meaning a lot of solid programming opportunities. Maybe I’m thinking of something else though.</p>
<p>Nah… about 30 sec for FTC, 20 sec for VEX.</p>
<p>The challenges aren’t that difficult, imo. If my coach didn’t hate me for no reason… and not put in a total bum for lead programmer… we could actually have a shot at going to St Louis for FTC worlds.</p>
<p>:/ I mean better than 15 seconds for FRC, which is too short for many coaches to put much urgency on programming.</p>
<p>For FRC though we basically just get to sign up for St. Louis because vet teams can go every other year without qualifying…different for FTC?</p>
<p>Not sure… I know we can qualify by winning the top award or winning the state championship. Neither of which we’ve done since FTC switched to Tetrix. On vex, we can consistently get to worlds, but finish about in the top half in the division.</p>
<p>Sadly, they don’t send me on the these things. Only the coach’s son and her head programmer.</p>
<p>My Vex team programmed their robot on the flight to Worlds…</p>
<p>and got top 10? or something</p>
<p>lol, the bot of the highlight team could be so much better.</p>
<p>And they spent so much time on it… when I could’ve done what they did in 30 minutes.</p>
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