FIRST Robotics Competition or FIRST Lego League Mentor/Coach?

Pre-College Issues High School Life
1

Let me mention:
-FIRST Robotics Competition is a robotics program (only for high-school students) that involves building autonomous robots to accomplish certain tasks. The high school that I will be attending next year already has a team. If I choose to participate in FRC, I will only be a team member.

-FIRST Lego League is a robotics program (for students in grades 4-8) that involves building autonomous Lego MINDSTORMS robots to accomplish certain tasks on a playing field (mat on a board). Since I will obviously be too old to participate as a team member next year (I am currently a student mentor for a team at my school), I can volunteer to mentor again as a 9th grader next year for the same school, serve as a coach for the same school, or try to start a team at one of my old elementary schools and serve as a coach there.

Which would look better for college admissions? For all options, I can set up a managable schedule to fit in the position, so time is not an issue at the moment. If I try to start a team, I already know that I can apply for a special grant that will help pay for team expenses and enlist nearby STEM buisnesses to help support the teams.

2

You may be able to do both. The FLL season is in the fall, and the Robotics season is in winter/spring. My D mentored the middle school team (2-3 days/week, 2 hours/day from beginning of Oct to end of Nov), and will start Robotics with the kickoff on Jan 9.

If you can’t do both, I would vote for being on the Robotics team. Although you’ll only be a member next year (9th grade), your responsibilities will grow as you move up to 12th grade, with several leadership positions on the team that you could potentially land. Good luck!

3

Many high school students do both FLL mentor and join the FRC team. Mentoring FLL is a way to give back to the FIRST community on what you learned and promote STEM; FRC will enable you to learn new engineering and project management skills. Both can be very involved but they are in different season, unless your FLL team is qualified for the Worlds. So you should do it only if your heart is in it, truly enjoy the experience, and wanted to learn, not for the college EC sake.