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For over half of my life I have been on an engineering competition team of some sort. Starting in middle school I was on an FLL team and in high school I was on an FTC team. In college I found the competition team community that fostered the same culture as what I was looking for: a fast paced, competitive environment with a strict goal to build something. I had started understanding the team-based architecture in mid to late high school and had even written a guide on how to be a good team member on our robotics team in high school lol.

In college I started to see where these types of teams end up as far as career aspects (TL;DR: they can me more valuable career-wise than your degree itself) but I also started to see that these teams are really quite a new phenomena and are easily mis-understood by those who have never heard of them. The classic university experience (centered around focusing on classes) doesn’t really fit with a dedicated competition team member and nor does that member give a fuck about that. All that dedicated team member cares about is getting their project done and competing against their peers at events. At times, the universities and the competition teams that inhabit them are at odds and sometimes its the teams fault and others its squarely on the side of admins. Almost every time the root cause is a failure to communicate and can best be resolved with talks where both parties respect and understand each other’s opinions and motivations (as with any other inter-personal disputes, but these especially can get heated and be really drawn out in my experience).

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Overall, I really think there should exist a book on competition teams and the experiences of the many thousands of students that participate in them each year. I think it’s main thesis should be about how they are more than about preparing a student for the workforce by giving them experience and that ideals that FIRST robotics instills in K-12th graders often gets carried into higher education within these competitions. I think it should also cover the differences in approaches to managing and facilitating them that the schools take as well as what the future could look like for the idea environment for competition teams.

if I were to lay out some chapters they would be:

  1. Introduction

    • 1.1 definition of a competition team

    • 1.2 history of competition teams

    • 1.3 FSAE history

  2. stories from students

    whether it be about a whole season, a competition experience, or a specific event, it would be interesting to gather some short stories from around the world about some of the awesome experiences students have had as a part of competition teams.

  3. The dedicated student experience

    • 3.1 what it means to be core

    • 3.2 leadership and fellowship

    • 3.3 the work and play environment

  4. The University’s side of things

  5. A deep dive on structure of teams

  6. Funding

  7. working well with others

  8. project management for competition teams

  9. Team Culture

  10. Leadership

  11. Ideals and Philosophy

  12. Sustainability

  13. The Future

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