Re: Advice for transition from student to mentor, too involved?
 

This is the most solid advice I see in this thread so far. Just this.

Every team is different.

You need to do what fits best for your team.

Listen to more experienced mentors: mentors need mentors too.

Re: Advice for transition from student to mentor, too involved?
 

IMHO: Building the Programming the robot is where Students should have a primary role, and Mentors should have a supervisory role.

Everything else, is whatever works for the team. For instance, We have all day Saturday meetings during build season. The parents make the lunch for the team. If Students should do everything, then they should make the lunch too.

To me, Scouting is very important, but if the Student's don't want to do it, then having a Mentor do it is fine.

In your case, you saw a hole (students not doing it), and filled the need. You mentioned: "very little interaction from the students (even tough I offered)." Did you "offer" or "recruit"? I can see during Build Season that everyone wants to be on the robot, and not doing other stuff.

Now that Build Season is over, Students have time to do other stuff, hence the interest in Scouting. You seem to be the Scouting Mentor, and it would be appropriate for you to now Supervise the effort.

I would tell the Students: Just like you would not redesign the robot for Champs, now is not the time to redesign the scouting system. You won't have the opportunity to test it in action before Champs. The system worked for the 2nd event, and they are free to improve it for Champs.

I don't think that would be "stepping on the student's toes". I think it is more giving them parameters for what they can do between now and Champs. If they want to design a whole new system and test it at a regional/district, then let them have at it. Short of that, it is not unreasonable to tell them they are stuck with what has been used. Improvements are fine. Redesign is not.

If you get guff from the Senior Mentors, ask them: If the students were trying to do something similar with the robot, would you let them do it? If not, then why isn't that "stepping on the Student's toes"?

Note: Going from Student to Mentor is similar to going from a worker to a manager. Your role now is to get the workers to do the work, and you step back and supervise/guide the activity.

Re: Advice for transition from student to mentor, too involved?
 

As far as the offer/recruit thing goes: I tried getting a few different students to help me with tablet setup, going over some minor android code (for the ones with some programming experience), and looking into how some calculations should be done. I had their attention for the day that I invited that person to help, they never showed continued interest so I didn't push it. when I was a student I was pot on committees I didn't want to be on, and I didn't do my best work when I didn't really want to help. The last thing I wanted was to stifle the students' fun and enthusiasm.

This is a great analogy, I think you hit the nail on the head with this one.

Thanks for the replies,
Skye

Re: Advice for transition from student to mentor, too involved?
 

First of all, thank you for willing to mentor. It is not the easiest role to fill on a team, and wanting to jump back in as a mentor is very awesome to hear. I myself could not get rid of FIRST when I went to college and ended up starting/mentoring a FRC team in my junior year.

Maybe, maybe not. While I'm not the greatest fan of the "every team is different" answer, this is a difficult question to be definitive about without knowing fully your team's dynamic. I think you will have to answer this question yourself (or maybe my other answers will help you).

I will say the fact that you're asking this and thinking about it to me shows that you are likely to not overstep bounds or at least you will realize it. In my mind, a good sign of a good mentor.



The short answer to this is "kinda...".

Long answer, I personally am a big believer of learning to fail. Not only is the feeling of success after a failure more gratifying but what you can learn can be much deeper. I've got numerous examples including this task at work I'm taking a break from because I've spent 2 days on it....

However, not everyone takes failure well, and while failure has a lot to offer, success captivates better, ie. failure is boring, success is fricking awesome. It is a difficult line to maintain as a mentor.

In this situation, I personally would engage the students in a discussion, and go over pros/cons of both. Potentially, ask them about ones they may miss and ultimately let them choose.

Not sure if you've had a discussion, but I think that's the appropriate action here. If that's happened, and they've still decided. Then I would let them potentially fail.


In no particular order, and in my very very short time as a mentor:

- Transitioning: It sounds like you've matured to be a mentor, but it's really important to make a mental transition. Everyone stresses this and having recently kinda gone through this transition, I can't stress it enough. I will admit I haven't fully made the transition yet, as I'm still a die-hard 1403 fan.

- Be Someone to Lean On: On the note about failure, I've always felt that a mentor is someone to lean on. As a mentor, you can be more than just a supervisor or a technical database. You can be someone to lean on and someone to rely on. If and when a student you're mentoring fails, pick them up, make them laugh, do whatever it takes to get them back to working on the problem.

- Build Better People: FIRST offers soo many opportunities beyond and within just building a robot. Take advantage of that to mentor your students to become better people. Keep an eye on small things that you can change in order to help build better people. This is my end goal, and if it is yours as well, always remember it.

- Step Back: Actively seek to step back. While your goal is to mentor as much as possible, you can mentor a lot by knowing when to step back. A simple example, over the course of the last 6 weeks, I used to hold one of the wrenches as a student was tightening a bolt, now he can tighten a bolt completely by himself.

- Keep a WIDE open mind: Some students can come up with the craziest ideas, try them, or if you don't have time, make sure you remember it and try them when time is not an issue. You might be surprised when something goes much better than you played it out..which leads me to...

- Remember, you are a student as well: Regardless of your age, you are a student. I don't mean that you specifically as a college student. I mean, continue to learn. I've learned as much if not more as a mentor than as a student. I know a lot of things about real life now like whoa-money-can-run-out, and not getting in legal trouble and fill-up-gas-before-a-meeting. But seriously, take this as an opportunity to make yourself a better person. Reach out to more people, ask more questions like this, network like crazy at FIRST events.

Most importantly, don't forget.
- Have FUN! and embarrass the crap out of all your students, when they have to say you're their mentor. Get them to embarrass the crap out of themselves.


Thank you for willing to be conscious about this. It's a step in the right direction to be a mentor if these are the types of questions you are asking yourself.

Re: Advice for transition from student to mentor, too involved?
 

One way I look at mentoring is to think "if I walk away after mentoring them on a project, will they be able to do this on their own?" More importantly, maybe "will they see the value of doing this?"

That said, I am not sure scouting is very well understood, especially with our freshmen and sophomores. I think an orientation to what it is and how it is used needs to be formally done every year, with a team decision on how to implement it (paper, program, or a combo of both.)

We made the mistake of trusting an app this year that didn't work well for us at competition. Thankfully, we brought our archaic paper system along as a backup.

On a personal level, I don't know where our team would be without our alumni mentors. You can do so much more than us old people, because it's more like peer pressure and they relate to you better. Thank you for all you are doing for your team!

Re: Advice for transition from student to mentor, too involved?
 

As I'm not a mentor I'm not going to comment too much on when people can go back to their previous teams.

Scouting wise, I would advise you stay away from paper at worlds. I've worked with our strategy department there twice before, and paper makes everything a hassle. Especially going through the data. We tried to do an excel database the second year, and it makes looking through the data a lot easier, but getting the data into it is a nightmare.

Ultimately though, even if your team is using paper I wouldn't advise drastically changing the way you scout for worlds. Everyone already knows what they need to do, and switching mediums now is just going to confuse your scouters.

Whatever you decide, don't make the decision yourself. Get the scouters together, and have a meeting. Maybe you can find out why they want to change and work together with them to improve your app. If the juniors and seniors aren't taking data, then I don't see why they should have input into the data collection system.

Whatever happens, good luck and I'll see you in St. Louis!