and our marketing includes information on how their engineers can connect with other FIRST teams. Our school has a unique location -- the number of people living in the district is less than the number of people working there, and most of them are at high-tech aerospace and other engineering firms.
Being situated in proximity to these companies gives us great access to sponsors, mentors, and expertise. We believe that this is a significant opportunity for spreading the word about FIRST to those companies and the professionals who work there. This asset has greatly influenced the amount of communication that occurs between passionate team members and engineers, scientists, designers, and other professionals. As a new team, we have not yet fully capitalized on these resources and we're just now hitting our stride in terms of marketing FRC and letting people know how cool FIRST is. But we are right on track in creating strong and long lasting ties with real-world engineers.
Already we have had the pleasure and special privilege of visiting many of the facilities of the spectacular engineering companies around our school. One very memorable moment for many team members was when the California Science Center Director attended and spoke at our school's academic awards night banquet about the engineering challenges in moving the retired space shuttle Endeavour across L.A.! We’ve even participated in events at our local community college, El Camino, on their Engineering Day.
We hope to further use these established channels of communication to share the values of FIRST. We know that many of these professionals would love to share their expertise with the community and we can act as the link to make this happen. We have reached out and acquired valuable mentors like Fazlul Zubair from Raytheon, Ralf Ihmels from Com Dev, Ted Dang from DARPA, David Stuart from Boeing, and Bill Kummer from Raytheon. Our growing communication with these professional individuals has allowed us to create a bridge between these engineers and local community members.
Community service:
Other service includes judging and volunteering at FLL regional competition, beach clean-ups, and homeless shelter work. Every Da Vinci Science student completes at least 25 hours of community service, although the great majority of students serve many more through service clubs. Interact alone has completed over 1,450 hours of community service this year.
pg. 19