Good day students, teachers, parents, sponsors, and anyone interested...

My name is Joseph Finkiewicz, past student of Nederland Middle Senior High School as well as a participant and leader of the High School Robotics club that competes in the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC). In this text, I will share my experiences, my reasons, and my benefits of joining our high school's robotics team. I am now a freshman in college at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida where I am majoring in aerospace engineering.

I joined the club in the 2004-2005 season, my last year in middle school, doing the FIRST Lego League competitions which was a blast and have been involved ever since. 2005-2006 I was a freshman and got involved in FRC where I was at first a little anxious and shy but quickly jumped on tasks and watched the fellow students and mentors doing their projects to gain knowledge about engineering.

Throughout my five years of First Robotics, I have learned a great deal in many skills: organization, leadership, work ethic, mechanical and electrical engineering, welding, manufacturing, teamwork, application of physics and mathematics for engineering, computer aided design using Autodesk Inventor along with community and fund raising events. Working with these fantastic individuals has been a real advantage to me.

If you are wondering why I am taking so long to write this blog I am typing this before my Introduction to Engineering class here at Embry-Riddle. Embry-Riddle was not my first choice of a college to attend since it costs a fine amount and I personally did not have the best grades during high school. I applied to University of Colorado at Boulder, Georgia Institute of Technology, Florida Institute of Technology, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, and Colorado Mountain College- Steamboat Springs. Embry-Riddle and Florida Institute of Technology were the only colleges even mentioning FIRST Robotics, you can still put that you have hands on engineering experience, but these two where the only ones to mention FIRST in their application. This is unfortunate but not a big deal. Except that FIRST Robotics participants share in $12,000,000 in scholarships available ONLY to them.

I give most of my credit of getting into a private aeronautical engineering based school to my hands on experience from FIRST Robotics and our team. Many people accepted to colleges for engineering have never built a robot or a model or worked on an engineering project like this and have very little to no hands on experience. Book smarts are great but if you have not learned how to apply them to a project like those in your career field you may never get anywhere.

We plan, design, fund raise, design- again depending on the game- build, test, and then compete with a robot. We get our mission six weeks before we have to ship it to the competitions. Relate this to the business setting, you get a project, plan on what you’re going to do, design it, test it on computers to make sure it is structurally accurate, file the proposed plan to make sure it is exactly what your boss/employer wants and then build and test it, all within a fine budget line.

I have experience in projects that I have put most of my last four years into, our high school robotics team. I would like to see it grow and evolve, our shop is small, but functional most of the time with the occasional saw breaking down or fuses blowing, but these are fixable. I personally would like to see high school students learning how to operate the tools of the engineering trade. Making them even more prepared for the careers and companies who need employees with experience. I would like our numbers to increase, involvement has always had its up and downs, this past season we had a good size team. I  hope this season it increases to get more involvement especially for those who want to become an engineer. Lastly I would like to remind all the engineering and even none engineering companies why, in my opinion, it is a worth wild investment donating to our or any FIRST team.

1. You get experienced entry-level employees for jobs who have learned to work with others and have developed problem solving skills.

2. You get a hard worker who has worked on a stressful and time consuming project that has requirements.

3. Gets students involved in many aspects of engineering: mechanical, electrical, software, computer, systems engineering, and problem solving.

If you would like to contact me with questions please email me at FINKIEWJ@my.erau.edu, It may take me a few days to email you back since I am very busy but I will get back to you.

Thanks for your time

Sincerely,

Joseph Finkiewicz