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<!DOCTYPE html>
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<title>Leaving ORION</title>
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一二三四
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一二三四-->Leaving ORION 2-9-2018
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I'm stepping down as vice president of ORION, below is my reasoning for leaving.
- - - - - - - - - - - - ---=[Why I'm Leaving ORION]=--- - - - - - - - - - - - -
-Preface:
To start off, I'd like to say that I don't think there's anything
objectively wrong with ORION, and that I'm leaving mostly because it wasn't what
I expected it to be. I wish the remaining members of ORION good luck on their
mission.
-The Mandelbots:
ORION was founded initally as a way for us to get funding for our
robotics team, The Mandelbots. This was the reason I joined ORION, but after the
last competition season I feel that that's no longer the case. ORION has moved
on to different goals, and I feel has distracted us from robotics.
Despite efforts by all of us to avoid them, we ran into the same issues
of bad time management that we did last year. In order to fund our team we had
to apply for grants through ORION, most of which only came in close to our
qualifier date. As a result the parts that we needed to build our robot came in
3 days before the qualifier, giving us only 3 days to build. However, the
late-coming grants don't explain why for the months before that, little or no
progress was made on the aspects of robotics that weren't so dependent on new
parts. For example, coding started only about a week before the competition, and
very few prototypes were built with the parts that we had from last season.
During those months without parts, we spent most of our meetings working
on other things. I admit, I too am guilty of this, but the one thing that has
taken up the most time in our robotics meetings was ORION. The thing with ORION
work is that the tasks it involves like applying for grants and planning for
future projects are all official business related to robotics, but nonetheless
are not robotics. So in my opinion they merely presented us with a more
acceptable way to procrastinate on the robot. We even had members of the team
who spent almost every meeting working on ORION projects that had nothing to do
with robotics.
There's nothing inherently wrong with focusing on ORION with our time,
but it's not what I signed up for and it's not why I agreed to host our robotics
meetings.
-The Future of ORION:
"ORION is a stem nonprofit ..." is how we would always introduce
ourselves while doing outreach, but it doesn't say much about our goals and how
we aim to acheive them. What ORION currently has in the works is a python class
and a potential robotics camp in Ghana. Personally, I disagree with these
projects, but this is in no way some sort of indictment.
For one, a single member of ORION has been the only one working on the
python class, and has requested that they be the only one to teach it. In the
months they have been working on the curriculum they have never even shown it to
other members of ORION, as far as I am aware of. There's nothing objectively bad
about this but I personally feel that given the python class is one of our main
focuses, there should be more collaboration involving all of us.
Ghana on the otherhand, I disagree with on the basis that it's too
misdirected. Why is it that we are running these camps in far off places with a
vaguely humanitarian goal? Shouldn't we focus on our own communities, and don't
they deserve to be taught by people from their own communities? The implication
has always been that because of economic reasons those communities can not set
up camps of their own, but if this is true then there are deeper issues to be
solved. To do things like set up a camp for them is like giving a band-aid to
someone who's just lost an arm.
-Conclusion:
It is because of all this that i'd like to leave ORION and will no
longer mention my previous association elsewhere. I wish the rest of ORION the
best of luck. This document will be hosted on my personal site, and any current
members of ORION are welcome to have any comments they have be hosted alongside
it if they email them to me at 1339802534.kk@gmail.com.
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