VISTA for FIRST

As noted in the post about my years bouncing between AIPT, WHD Planning and Live in HoCo, the financial crisis of 2007-2008 did a number on my confidence in our family’s (and nation’s) financial situation. I was 50 years old and didn’t need to make much to safely glide into my full retirement years/funds but I felt it would be best if I made some income over the coming decade rather than relying on Barb’s income and forcing her to keep working. However, in the wake of the financial crisis the job market also tanked. Between late 2008 and early 2009, I applied for a number of non-profit and marketing positions and can’t recall a single positive response.

In April 2009, President Obama signed a National Service Act that expanded the Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) program and he talked up the notion of serving the country to help the economic recovery. I didn’t know much about the VISTA program but I rather liked the notion of volunteering in an organized way to help the country. I had a lingering sense of guilt over never serving my country in a military or other capacity and it seemed like a good alternative to explore. In late April or early May, I started looking into the VISTA program to see what it offered. I liked the idea of volunteering for a year to get my feet wet in a new workplace/environment and see where things led from there. The fact that VISTA programs offered a small stipend made it even more appealing.

I registered online and gained access to a database of VISTA volunteer openings in the DC-Maryland-Virginia region. There were a number of worthy-looking opportunities at homeless shelters, food kitchens, and other organizations that dealt directly with the poor, disabled or marginalized. Most of these openings were located in inner-city DC or Baltimore, which was not immediately appealing to me. I wanted to do something useful but also wanted flexibility to still take care of Allie and her transportation timetables.

I applied for one opportunity with a furniture donation center in Silver Spring and quickly got an interview. However, driving down to the center and interviewing in their warehouse made it pretty clear to me that it was not going to be a good fit. I was pleased to get interest from them but declined.

There was one listing on the VISTA database that looked almost like a joke, too good to be true. It was for a robotics program for K-12 students, FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) (website). The position was to help spread the program to disadvantaged youth throughout the state of Maryland but there was no fixed office so working from home was OK or even preferred. The position seemed like it was made for me. I applied and within 24 hours got a response, had a quick phone interview with someone from FIRST‘s New Hampshire headquarters and almost immediately had an appointment for an in-person interview in Maryland.

The in-person interview was with Jenny Beatty and we arranged to meet the next day, Friday, May 8, 2009, at UMBC in Catonsville. It was a pleasant spring day and we actually held the interview on a bench outside UMBC’s Retriever Activity Center which I learned was the location for Maryland’s FIRST LEGO League (FLL) Championship. Jenny was a FIRST Senior Mentor and was effectively the only FIRST employee in Maryland at the time. We hit it off immediately and had a very pleasant and productive interview/discussion for nearly two hours. At the end of it, she took me into one of UMBC’s engineering labs to introduce me to Dr. Anne Spence and her associate, Jaime Gurganus, who together ran FLL in Maryland.

I left the interview very encouraged, and evidently so did Jenny. She later told me she immediately got on the phone with FIRST HQ and told them “don’t let this one get away.” I received a call by the end of that afternoon from FIRST HQ offering me the position.

Within a week I started attending meetings with Jenny and various groups in the Maryland FIRST universe. The first was with a group of high school team leaders and mentors called the Baltimore Area Alliance (now called the Maryland Robotics Alliance) who were planning an event called the Battle of Baltimore in August. I started to understand this robotics scene included a community of very dedicated volunteers who took their informal and unpaid roles very seriously. Some were friendly and supportive to a newcomer like me, others were more diffident; there was an interesting mix of competitiveness and collaboration evident from the outset. I also learned a little about a former leader of the FIRST program in Maryland, Mike Wade, a NASA machinist who passed away about a year earlier from a heart attack. He and a number of other folks from before my time had been instrumental in getting FIRST programs off the ground in Maryland. It was obvious he left big shoes to fill and there was a hole on the hearts of many who knew him, but at the same time, no one seemed interested in taking up the range of responsibilities needed to coordinate and run the various programs. Jenny was one of the few people who provided continuity and involvement in all of the programs.

I attended an exhibition at the Baltimore Convention Center in June, part of a larger NASA education conference. it was my first chance to see the high school FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) robots and teams in action. I saw the “field” the size of a basketball court with six clunky looking robots scooting around alarmingly quickly, under the control of kids at either end with video game joysticks. The robots themselves looked like stripped down dishwashers, not very appealing, but very quick with different designs for scooping and shooting balls. Each “game” was only a few minutes long and involved some incomprehensible scoring rules. I learned that the game and rules changed each season, and each year the teams had just six weeks in January-February to learn the game, design and build their robots, then compete at events in March-April. The rest of the time was “off-season” but the teams were still busy doing exhibitions and fund-raising. It was a complicated, competitive world that would take me some time to learn.

Before I could officially start working I needed to attend a four-day orientation “VISTA boot camp” operated by AmeriCorps. FIRST paid for me to attend the next available session in Philadelphia starting July 14. That worked out well for me because we had our long-planned trip to China with the Speizmans in June. The training session was held at the Philadelphia Marriott near City Hall and Reading Market. I had to share a room with another aging volunteer, a pleasant enough gentleman from Rhode Island. He was fine but it sure was uncomfortable sharing a room with anyone other than Barb. The training included inspirational lectures on volunteering, fighting poverty, respecting minority and indigenous cultures, and not getting sued…all worthy topics but very little that I was able to put to direct use, though I did come home with a nice notebook for the shelf. One thing the training made clear: VISTA volunteers were not to be responsible for or involved with fund raising for their host organizations, a proscription that was fine with me.

Through July and August I was on many conference calls, tried to get a handle on the number of teams in Maryland and began to update and redesign the Maryland FIRST website, working with Marco Ciavolino, a key volunteer and webmaster. I electronically met Pattie Cook, the regional director for FIRST in Virginia who was responsible for the top-level FRC program and competitions in Maryland, DC and Virginia. I soon learned that she and Jenny had a contentious relationship and in fact, Jenny soon quit her position as Senior Mentor after one too many dust ups with Pattie and others. That left me as the only quasi-official FIRST representative on the ground in Maryland. Jenny stayed involved with things in Maryland but in an unofficial capacity and she could not be my local supervisor. I was pointed to work more closely with Denise Lewis, the Senior Mentor and Assistant Regional Director for Washington, DC. I would have to sort things out between Pattie and Denise for FRC, Anne Spence and Jamie Gurganus for FLL and Jr.FLL, and Jeff Tjiputra for yet another program, the FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC). Things were already getting confusing.

In mid-August I went to Manchester, NH, for my official orientation with FIRST along with a number of other VISTA volunteers from around the country. Things got off to a fun start attending a minor league baseball game featuring the New Hampshire Fisher Cats. I was pleased to bring a team t-shirt home to Barb and our house of Fisher-Duncan cats.

The actual training was four days at FIRST‘s headquarters in a series of renovated 19th century mills along the Merrimack River. The mills included a museum with a huge LEGO model of the entire mill complex. It turned out the mills, the museum, FIRST and much more in Manchester were all tied to the largesse of Dean Kamen, a noted inventor and wealthy entrepreneur most famous at that point for the Segway even though that turned out to be far from the success he originally envisioned. He actually made most of his money from medical devices and an array of other innovations he and his team of engineers at DEKA (also headquartered in the mills) developed. Dean was the founder and main spokesman for FIRST and while he was not heavily involved in day-to-day operations it was clearly a passion project for him: an effort to change the world by inspiring the next generation of innovators. If we met Dean during that first training session it was only for a few minutes but his presence was very much in the air.

As we learned about FIRST and the story of Dean Kamen, we also started to hear about Woodie Flowers, the MIT professor who co-founded FIRST with Dean. Woodie was kind of the hippie-guru-priest-prophet of FIRST, the yin to Dean’s yang (or maybe it’s the other way around — yin and yang concepts are like that). The FIRST competition was loosely based on a staple of Woodie’s engineering classes where he grouped students in teams, gave them a simple kit of parts, a specific challenge to solve, and a tight deadline. Woodie coined the concepts of “gracious professionalism” and “coopertition” that became philosophical underpinnings of FIRST. We didn’t meet Woodie on our initial training session at FIRST but he was a near-saintly presence at many of the major competitions over the years.

The Battle of Baltimore off-season FRC event took place August 22 at the Park School, my first chance to actually see a competition. It was hectic and confusing though I had no real role other than to meet lots of people and get a sense of the game. Jenny was very involved with all the volunteers at the event and acted as my guide.

Around the same time, an inspirational PBS documentary about FIRST called “Gearing Up” aired (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4). One of the teams featured was a Baltimore all-girls rookie team, the RoboDoves from Western High School and their lead mentor, Ron Karpinski. It’s still an excellent introduction to the FIRST program and its ambitions, and features scenes from the 2008 Chesapeake Regional FRC event held at the Naval Academy. The documentary concludes with a quote from Ron, “What we do here is not magic, but it’s magical.” I always thought that was a million-dollar tagline.

I got progressively more involved in the planning for the Chesapeake Regional FRC event to be held in March at the Baltimore Convention Center for the first time after many years at the Naval Academy. The Naval Academy venue was undergoing renovations and no longer available so the Convention Center was selected even though it was considerably more expensive. I at least had some experience with the Convention Center having exhibited there with Hekimian at WAVE Conferences back in 1990 and 1992. For this Chesapeake Regional. there was a planning committee of mostly Maryland people involved and lots of conference calls but it was clearly becoming Pattie’s show with a big emphasis on fundraising and sponsorships.

In my initial months I shamelessly tapped into what contacts I had in the local business community, including Faith Horowitz (Speizman) who helped connect me to the Howard County technology community and grant opportunities, and my tennis buddy Duncan Brown who already knew of FIRST through his work at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. Both would be important and very helpful contributors to the program in coming years. Duncan immediately agreed to host an open house for FIRST at APL and put the word out to the entire Maryland Chapter of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. The open house in early September drew nearly 100 participants and helped get a number of new teams started. Duncan went further and agreed to host a FIRST LEGO League competition at APL in January, a tradition that continued for more than a decade.

Through September and October I started going to various exhibitions and conferences, setting up a tabletop to spread the word about FIRST, and meeting more of the teams and key volunteers in Maryland. I worked with Jenny to put together a census of Maryland teams and display them on a map. As we got started the 2009-2010 season there were 26 FRC teams, 22 FTC teams, 83 FLL and 13 Jr.FLL teams, reaching an estimated total of 1,200 students in just over half of Maryland’s counties. This count of teams became one of the key metrics I sought to improve: get more teams involved in the program, especially ones from underserved communities.

The first time I saw Dean Kamen speak was at an October meeting of the Congressional Robotics Caucus (who knew there was such a thing?) on Capitol Hill where I helped man a tabletop exhibit along with a team from Pennsylvania. Dean was quite inspirational telling stories about the mission and appeal of FIRST. He was also an intimidating presence — a wiry, short man with a rock star vibe. He seemed to command the center of attention wherever he went, even when he was among congressional staffers (very few members of congress showed up that day, something of a disappointment).

The next day I was at Marriott’s Ridge High School exhibiting at a Maryland teacher’s conference. My tabletop display was largely the work of several key employees at Northrop Grumman who sponsored FIRST Lego League in Maryland. The only thing I contributed or had in my possession at that point was the FIRST sign and the map Jenny and I worked on.

In early November I attended the annual Mentor Education Day put on by the Baltimore Area Alliance, held at the Community College of Baltimore County in Catonsville. It was impressive to see more than 100 adult and student mentors from FRC teams all over Maryland for a day of free workshops they put together for each other. I was starting to really appreciate the level of time and effort these teachers, professionals and older students volunteered on behalf of FIRST and the other teams for the sake of making each other better. I had almost no idea of what the technical sessions were talking about but the team building and marketing sessions made more sense to me.

Later in November I visited a Boy’s and Girl’s Club in Annapolis which had their own FIRST Lego League teams. I was impressed by their facilities and service to underserved youth in Annapolis. Here was an example of successful outreach to poorer kids in the region led by some of the best FIRST volunteers in the area. A separate nonprofit, LET’S GO Boys and Girls, grew from the seed of this collaboration with the Boy’s and Girl’s Clubs in Maryland. Over the years, I worked closely with several of the key folks at LET’S GO but could never quite crack the code with the founder, Corky Graham, a retired Northrop Grumman executive. There was room for collaboration and cooperation but we also competed for sponsorship dollars from the Maryland technology community.

On December 4, I headed to La Plata in southern Maryland to help set up for my first real competition, the Maryland FTC Championships and an FLL Qualifier at the College of Southern Maryland. The FTC partner, Jeff Tjiputra, was a computer science professor at the college and ran the event. He graciously offered me and a few key volunteers hotel rooms the night before the event so we could help with set up. The main event was held in the basketball arena at the college, though FLL and FTC activities were spread over several buildings. It was a bigger production than I expected. I helped with setup as best as I could but was mostly just a spare set of hands. Jeff hosted a nice dinner for the key volunteers and I once again saw it was a congenial, very dedicated group of folks who seemed to enjoy getting together for these annual events.

The event day started ungodly early to me as we arrived around 6am to get things ready for the teams. I didn’t have a particular assignment in the morning so was free to roam around and observe for the first time. This was a dual FTC and FLL event, 24 FTC teams and 16 FLL teams, maybe 200 students and nearly that many parents, mentors and family members. The teams arrived, got settled in their “pits,” and went through inspections and judging. For the FTC teams this meant robot inspections and a closed-door interview session with judges. I took pictures of a few teams getting their robots inspected; as it turned out these happened to be three of the perennially best teams that I would get to know well over the coming years, the students and especially their mentors/parents.

The FLL teams had three stages of judging: technical, presentations, and problem-solving. This was the first year of qualifying tournaments in Maryland which entailed nine 16-team events across the state and this event at the College of Southern Maryland was the first qualifier.

In the afternoon, the main competitions got underway and it was something of a three-ring circus with FLL and FTC rounds happening more or less simultaneously. I was assigned as a “queuer” getting teams to their appointed matches at the right time. I was confused as hell but the teams seemed to know what was going on. The FLL game was completely different than the FTC game. FLL was a kind of “beat the clock” with each team’s robot trying to score the most points in 2.5 minutes on a tabletop board, though two tables were hooked together and there was some level of cooperation possible between tables. The FTC game was more of a head-to-head competition with “alliances” of two teams trying to score more points than the competing alliance by shooting or pushing balls on the field for 2.5 minutes. The scene was noisy and energetic, with game announcers, video screens and cheering from the stands.

There was even dancing in the breaks…”Cotton Eyed Joe” seemed to be a favorite.

By the end of the day I was quite tired and happy to head home as a snow storm started to hit. For the FTC teams, this was their only competition in Maryland. A couple of teams won the right to advance to the FIRST World Championships held in May in Atlanta, including Team 2843, Under the Son. For the FLL teams, this was a “qualifier”; several teams advanced to the Maryland FLL Championships in January. For the others it was their only shot at competing. It seemed to me to be a lot of work for the teams to compete for just a few minutes total on the actual field/board, but given the amount of effort, energy and the number of volunteers involved in putting on the events it was easy to see why the competitions didn’t happen more often.

The first Saturday in January 2010, I was involved with the official kickoff of the high school FRC season. FIRST made a big deal of keeping each season’s game and kit of materials secret until they would be revealed to all teams around the world at the same time. From that moment, all teams had six weeks to design, build and test their robots before coming to competitions. The night before, I helped Rob Thate, the organizer of the kickoff event, get the kits — basically bins of motors, parts and a few structural metal pieces — ready to distribute to the teams. Rob was a NASA engineer who had worked with Mike Wade in previous years. Rob was emphatically a hardware guy, very tightly connected to FIRST and responsible for getting the basketball-sized metallic fields moved around the country and properly set up for events. Rob was head of the Robotics Alliance Project and quite proud of the large trailer he hauled around the country on behalf of FIRST and NASA.

On Saturday, January 9, representatives from most of Maryland’s 26 FRC teams, along with a few from DC and Northern Virginia, convened at Capitol College (now Capitol Technology University) near Greenbelt. Jenny was on hand to help get teams checked in and make sure the show ran smoothly. There wee a few technical training sessions available before everyone convened in the auditorium for the live kickoff event beamed from FIRST headquarters in Manchester, NH. They made a big production of unveiling the new season’s game and getting teams excited about the wonders and glories of FIRST. We carefully handed the kits out to teams, getting their signatures for each piece, then off they went to their respective locations to start brainstorming on this season’s challenge. It was exciting and a little surprising to see how fired up everyone was.

I visited a few of the teams while they were in their 6-week build cycle but there wasn’t a whole lot I could glean from their activity. For the most part, my attention split between getting ready for the Maryland FLL Championship later in January and the Chesapeake Regional FRC event to be held in Baltimore in March.

On January 16 I helped with the FLL Qualifier at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab run by my friend Duncan Brown. It was a very successful event in a nice venue with a bunch of very capable APL volunteers. Duncan and the APL marketing folks put together an excellent video summarizing the event:

The Maryland FLL Championship was held on January 30 at the Retriever Activities Center at UMBC. I helped with a Jr.FLL Expo (mainly run by Tracey Klein, one of Marco’s team leaders at TechBrick) and man the display of FTC and FRC robots at the event. This was a much larger event than the FTC Championship with 64 teams attending and a long, full day of judging and robot rounds. Anne Spence and Jamie Gurganus ran a vibrant, upbeat show with the help of nearly 100 volunteers coordinated by Jenny Beatty. Some of these photos from the event were taken by Beverly Lynn Photography and were subsequently used on the Maryland FIRST website so I think I can reproduce them without copyright infringement.

With the FTC and FLL seasons now concluded in Maryland, my attention shifted ever more toward FRC and the Chesapeake Regional event coming to Baltimore in March. The conference calls, meetings and emails with Pattie and the planning committee became feverish and often tense. There seemed to be thousands of details involving teams, volunteers, sponsors, hotel rooms, scheduling, food, parking, equipment logistics, press outreach and more. I was a focal point for information but often had more questions than I had answers. Pattie seemed consumed with worries over sponsors and VIPs. Jenny and other folks were more concerned with teams and volunteers safely and successfully navigating the three-day event. Oh, by the way, did I mention there was also a DC Regional FRC Competition at the DC Convention Center the first weekend in March? For as much effort and wheel-spinning there was going on for the Chesapeake Regional, there was even more for the DC Regional which had a higher profile and was also a first-time event. Fortunately, I was only on the periphery of that tornado.

On February 5-6 the Mid-Atlantic was rocked by a double-barrelled blizzard which became known as Snowmageddon, dumping 2-3 feet of snow over a wide area. Some school systems in Maryland were shut for a week which meant many teams could not work on their robots during a critical window of the short build season. Teams went to extraordinary lengths to assist each other where they could — it was a real test and triumph of the community, especially when FIRST ruled there would be no special exemptions or treatment for teams that had troubles.

On February 20, I helped exhibit at a big STEM event at the National Building Museum in DC, subbing for Denise who was overwhelmed by planning for the DC Regional. Our friends from Northrop Grumman also helped with the exhibit, along with several teams from Maryland and DC. It was one of the busiest events we were involved with all year and we handed out tons of literature, scoring many outreach points albeit with questionable effectiveness…but it was fun to be in DC and the Building Museum was always a treat to see.

On March 4-6, I commuted via Metro daily to the DC Convention Center to help with the DC Regional. This was my first taste of the full-scale craziness of a three-day FIRST Robotics Competition high school event. It was also my first chance to see Pattie in full nervous bloom over the VIPs and DC dignitaries, not to mention Dean Kamen himself as a special guest. It was all a little too much to take in and I managed to take no photos of my own. Fortunately, I didn’t have a lot of direct responsibilities other than to help with student ambassadors and tours of the venue. I was mainly riding the roller coaster trying to get my footing in advance of the Chesapeake Regional in Baltimore the following week.

What a crazy, exhausting schedule! I couldn’t believe the amount of effort and energy expended by the teams, volunteers, and handful of actual FIRST employees including a few that came down from Manchester along with trucks and trucks of equipment. The Maryland FLL and FTC Championships had each been crazy but an FRC Regional was on a whole different level. I also got my first taste of the somewhat arbitrary nature of actual game play (the game that year was Breakaway (animation), for those keeping track) and judging involved in the competition. It was quickly evident to me that there was nearly as much luck and politicking as there was skill involved in determining the winners of the on-field play and many judged awards, not to mention deciding who would advance to the FIRST Championships in Atlanta in April.

Baltimore activities got underway in earnest with coverage from FOX-45’s Tuesday morning show. I had to get up around 4am to get into Baltimore’s Dunbar High School (Team 1748) at 5am to welcome the TV crew and a handful of bleary-eyed but excited student team members and coaches. FOX aired a series of short live “hits” over several hours featuring student interviews and closeups of their robot. We were in show business!

We got into the Baltimore Convention Center on Wednesday to start setting up our event. Two key folks helped run the main equipment setup: Steve Krawic from Show Ready Events who was contracted to FIRST nationwide managed the overall show plus the rigs of bleachers, lights and A/V equipment, and Rob Thate from NASA with his trucks of field equipment. Dozens of our local volunteers, organized by Jenny Beatty, provided the free labor to get things done. Pattie Cook showed up to fuss over the VIP room and arrangements. I mainly helped her, worked with FTC Team 2843 Under the Son on an FLL and FTC demo area, and coordinated with Jenny and other volunteers setting up all the team, volunteer and judging areas.

Setup continued on Thursday morning before the teams started arriving in the afternoon for check-in and their opportunity to set up. The actual event started Friday morning. We had special guest speakers including Baltimore’s Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, Maryland Congressman Elijah Cummings, media personality Mario Armstrong, and Olympic skater Kimmie Meissner. We had more TV coverage from a local Baltimore station and celebrity chef Duff Goldman (Ace of Cakes) showed up during the event.

Results from the 2010 Chesapeake Regional are still available via FIRST and the volunteer BlueAlliance website. Four Maryland teams advanced to the FIRST Championships including Team 1629 Garrett Coalition from western Maryland, a true powerhouse of a team led by some of the nicest and most dedicated people I ever met, especially mentor and teacher Chuck Trautwein who deserves a much more notable presence on the internet than I have found. I met many other outstanding team mentors and volunteers but was especially impressed by Anne and Steve Shade, a true FIRST couple who met through the program and remained (and remain) intensely involved and dedicated to FIRST.

Marco Ciavolino and I produced a “wrap video” summarizing the 2010 Chesapeake Regional which I was happy to track down. We have hundreds of other photos and documents of the event which I have located in my archives but will spare you the gory details for the time being. I’m still wrestling with how much detail to include in these posts.

We did a post-event survey of the event and I put together a pretty good summary which gives you some idea of the level of detail and different aspects of the event — each of which involved a good chunk of work on the part of someone, usually volunteers.

I was surprised to be named Volunteer of the Year and received an award. There was some grumbling (deserved) and I felt a bit guilty because I wasn’t actually an unpaid volunteer but the Planning Committee made the decision without my involvement. It was a nice gesture and I felt well appreciated.

After the Chesapeake Regional, I was able to take a short vacation break in Williamsburg with Barb and Allie before plunging into the post-mortem work of thank yous, surveys and summaries of the event.

In April, I was able to attend the FIRST Championships in Atlanta, my first look at the culminating three-ring circus of FIRST’s worldwide competitions. Held in the cavernous Georgia Dome with team pits in the adjacent Convention Center, it was the equivalent of six simultaneous FRC competitions along with large FTC and FLL events. It drew upwards of 20,000 team members, spectators and volunteers for three days of often frenzied action. As a VISTA, I was assigned to give tours and basically run errands for people behind the scenes. Jenny and others from Maryland were there to orient me amid the madness; I mostly was able to soak in the atmosphere and cheered on our Maryland teams. I was delighted when FTC Team 2486 Under the Son actually won the World Championship at their level.

I decided I wanted to stay with the program if I could and while at the FIRST Championships began discussions with headquarters staff about prospective positions. They pointed me in the direction of Pattie Cook who was the Regional Director for FRC programs in Maryland, DC and Virginia. I wasn’t exactly eager to work directly for Pattie but she was the one with the local budget and she needed help on the ground in Maryland. She agreed to consider different arrangements for me but deferred any concrete discussions until after the FIRST Partner Conference in June.

My year of service as a VISTA drew to a close in May and June. I took part in various local exhibits around Maryland to promote FIRST programs and encourage new teams. We started planning for the new seasons that would come with the new school year, even though my role was still in limbo.

As a culmination of our service year, VISTAs from around the country were invited to Manchester, NH, in early June to participate in the annual Partner Conference. FIRST’s Regional Directors and Affiliate Partners were a disparate assemblage of nearly 200 individuals from independent non-profit organizations or university affiliates that ran FIRST operations (often just one or two but sometimes all four FIRST programs) in various states, parts of states, or sometimes bunches of states or countries. Jenny was able to attend on behalf of Maryland FLL and UMBC; she introduced me to her cohort of friends and helped me navigate among the wide range of personalities and histories of various attendees. She and I were the only ones from Maryland. Pattie and Denise were there but mostly worried about FRC in Virginia and DC.

It was eye-opening for me to see the hodge-podge of different skill levels, backgrounds, organizations and personalities that made FIRST tick around world. The three-day conference was a chance to recap the previous season, share/learn some operations skills, and preview the coming season. I did my best to shuffle among different concurrent tracks for FLL, Jr. FLL, FTC and FRC programs. It was an informative whirlwind with a lot of built-in socializing time so folks could get to know one another and encourage cross-program cooperation. It was clear that some regions were better at working across multiple programs than others. Our situation in Maryland, DC and Virginia was one of the most complicated arrangements but we were not alone in having contentious and complex relationships.

One of the big social events was held at Dean’s hilltop home/mansion/lair just outside Manchester to honor FIRST’s 20th anniversary. Dean’s home was a modernist man-cave built to his specifications featuring a working mill wheel in the foyer, a full Tony Stark/Batman metal-working and electronics shop in the basement that was open to the main entertaining and living levels, an indoor pool, secret passageways between rooms, a closet full of Dean’s identical blue jean and workshirt wardrobe, vintage pinball machines and elaborate clocks that Dean’s DEKA engineers built for him, a rooftop cupola offering a 360-degree view of New Hampshire and neighboring states on a clear day, and a notable lack of any feminine touches anywhere. We were given run of the house for an hour or so before sitting down to a catered lobster dinner in his two-helicopter heated garage — the helicopters were parked outside for the evening. It was quite a show capped off with self-congratulatory inspirational speeches from Dean, Woodie Flowers and various FIRST board members. I know I took more pictures but these are all I can find now.

By the end of June, Pattie made an offer for me to become the Assistant Regional Director for FIRST in Maryland, reporting to her and her non-profit, VirginiaFIRST. This arrangement would extend my duties working on behalf of all four FIRST programs in Maryland, with added responsibility for fund-raising in Maryland, more or less parallel to the arrangement Denise had with Pattie for DC. I was pleased with the new position but not at all happy that Pattie offered a salary even lower than my VISTA stipend. I decided to swallow my financial pride and work for another year in this role. I enjoyed working with the volunteers and teams in Maryland, the challenge of making their experience better, and growing each of the programs within the state. If I could successfully raise funds in Maryland it would be easier to justify a boost in salary down the road.