As time flies by and [some] students go from finding an interest in robotics to joining or attempting to join a team, we eventually transition into a stage in life with a plethora of opportunities such as college. Along the way, we make many important decisions which can dictate the person we become. Here on the VEX Forum, there is a community of teachers, mentors and students, all of whom have information and experience which can help guide fellow robotics enthusiasts through the decisions and questions that they encounter.
Personally, I am finding the gap separating me from college to be shrinking rapidly. On that note, does anyone have any advice on how to get into a VEX U team such as what VEX U teams may be looking for in applicants? Advice relating to other VEX competitions than just VEX U, or even general advice is also welcome.
You can find VEXU teams by looking at Robotevents, both teams and events are listed there.
I’ve been involved with 3 VEX U teams. The first. KTOR, was a group of friends at different schools that created a team. They secured some funding (some of it from STEM Robotics) and built out of one of the members places. It was on the shoestring level of doing things, like they practiced at local VEX HS locations. They piggybacked on VEX HS events by setting up earlier and playing VEX U matches as events late into Friday. Because of their talent and skills they won the Excellence Award in 2010 and two of them were Mentor of the year in 2011.
The second was GULLS, and my interactions with them were limited, we just did an event for them on a Friday evening.
The third was with UDEL, that was started by a group of students that had participated in VRC in high school. It was funded by the University and they got additional team members by word of mouth. They had an event last season at their UofD makerspace.
VEXU is an amazing amount of travel, the schools are separated and driving from event to event is normal. I’ve seen teams go to a late Friday event, drive and go to a Saturday event then drive to a Sunday event. So that part isn’t for the faint of heart.
At the University level there is an amazing amount of club activity. I taught at Drexel and they did a wide range of engineering things from robotics to racing. UPenn across the street has an amazing drone program. So you might want to look to see what your school offers.
On another tangent, College is hard. You might want to consider not doing a competition season in your first year. I’ve worked with FIRST students that want to come back as mentors in their freshman year and other mentors and myself strongly discourage that.
Hi! I’ve been on a VEX U team for almost 3 years now. This answer will vary a lot depending on where you’re located. I’m in Southern California and while it’s been getting better recently it was very common to struggle to have enough teams to make a qualifying event. Compared to VRC there are a lot fewer VEX U teams and they can on average be less competitive than high school and middle school teams. For example, we don’t have our first competitions till mid-January/early February and we have about 3 qualifying competitions (most only have 1 or 2 qualifying spots). That is not to say were not competitive as last year a team from our region, CPSLO, made it to the world finals. I know my team personally accepts all applicants but due to the demand of college class commitment/ and retention is low(when I joined there was pretty much one other veteran builder who also did the majority of the coding). A lot of teams have websites or Instagram so id always recommend messaging them on there to see if they do things differently then we do.
All that being said VEX U allows for much more creative designs as we have a lot fewer limits on what we can build/how we can build(like Pyro in Spin-Up) I’ll be happy to answer and more specific questions if you have any but that’s just what I can think of off the bat.