Interviews and pit judging
What happens in the structured interview, how pit visits differ, and how to prepare a team that answers well under pressure.
By the end you can
- Prepare for the structured interview format and its rules
- Handle pit judging, which is unscheduled and easy to be caught out by
- Give answers that are specific, honest, and shared across the team
On this page · 6 sections
Judges form most of their impression of your team in about fifteen minutes, face to face, before they have read a word of your portfolio. That is the interview.
The structured interview
Formerly called the formal interview, the structured interview is your scheduled session: a presentation, if your team chooses to give one, followed by a question-and-answer session with the judges.
A few rules worth knowing before the day:
- No photos or audio/video recording is permitted during the session, by teams or by volunteers.
- Judges focus on you during the session, and review your portfolio afterwards. Do not spend the interview reading your portfolio aloud. They will read it themselves.
- Time is fixed and short. Practise against a timer, including the part where you get cut off.
Preparing the presentation
- Rehearse to time, out loud, standing up. Reading a script silently is not practice.
- Get every student speaking. Judges notice when two people present and six stand silently, and it undercuts the claim of a student-run team.
- Lead with the story, not the specs. What you set out to do, what went wrong, what you changed, where you ended up.
- Have a fallback. If your slides fail, the presentation still has to happen. Assume the technology will not work.
The Q&A
This is the part that actually differentiates teams, and it cannot be scripted. Judges follow up on what they hear.
- Answer the question asked, then stop. Long unfocused answers burn the time you need for the questions that would have shown you well.
- Route questions to the person who did the work. If a judge asks about the intake, the student who built the intake answers. A captain who answers everything reads as a team where one person does everything.
- Say "I don't know" when you don't, then say who would, or what you would do to find out. Judges have seen every bluff and it costs you credibility across every award.
- Bring numbers. "We raised money from local businesses" is weak. "We raised $4,200 from six local sponsors, and four renewed from last season" is evidence.
Robot questions get rehearsed; business questions get improvised. Have prepared, specific answers for: what the season costs, how you fund it, who your sponsors are and what they get, how many people your outreach reached, how you recruit, and what happens to the team when the current leaders graduate. Those map directly onto Connect, Reach, and Sustain.
Pit judging
Pit visits are the part rookie teams are unprepared for, because they are not scheduled. Judges walk up during the competition day, often while you are mid-repair, and talk to whoever is standing there.
That has real implications:
- Every team member must be able to talk about the team. Not just the captain. The judge speaks to whoever is present, and "you'd have to ask someone else" is a bad answer repeated across a day.
- Keep the pit presentable and the banner visible. It is a physical impression of how organised you are.
- Be ready to demonstrate the robot and explain a mechanism in under a minute.
- Judges may return to follow up on something. Consistency between what different students say matters.
Brief the whole team before the event
Run a short session the week before: here is what we are claiming, here are our numbers, here is who built what. A team where every student can give the same three facts about the funding model and the outreach numbers looks dramatically better organised than one where only the captain can.
Practise with strangers
Internal practice has a ceiling, because your teammates already know what you mean.
Ask a parent who is not involved, a teacher, or a mentor from another team to run a mock interview and ask deliberately awkward follow-ups. This is the same principle as the external review pass on your sponsorship writing, the value is in someone who does not share your assumptions.
Judged awards are winnable with a modest robot
A rookie team with a simple robot that parks reliably, a clear engineering story, real outreach numbers, and a funded, documented plan for next season is genuinely competitive for Connect, Reach, and Sustain, and therefore for Inspire. This is the most accessible route to advancement available to a new team, and it is the one the business side of the team controls.
Check yourself
A judge asks how your team will keep running after its current leaders graduate. What is the strongest answer?
Next
Judging is where the whole track pays off: your budget, your sponsors, your outreach, and your plan for next season are the evidence.
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