Re: Teams losing lots of seniors
 

Now you have.:)

Re: Teams losing lots of seniors
 

Team 836 is losing about 13 seniors. However a few of us are coming back and dedicating time to mentor the team. One of our biggest problems is we are losing our 2 best programmers. But we have some awesome mentors and I hope that end of the robot will work out. As for the rest of the robot, the rookies and our junior members have that one under control.

Re: Teams losing lots of seniors
 

Just about half of team will be graduating next week. The cool thing is of the 15 kids 10 are going on to study engineering in college, 3 are studying other things in college and two are going to work....in local industry.

It will be tuff to replace these great kids.

These are sad and exciting times.

Have a great "off-Season"

Steve Yasick

Re: Teams losing lots of seniors
 

"Knowledge management" is a key issue in industry where more people are moving from job to job now, and where layoffs are so prevelant. As employees leave, they take their knowledge base with them. Losing seniors/mentors can have devastating effects on a team if the team has no processes in place to capture that knowledge. The ideal would be to nurture freshman and sophomores, let juniors take the lead roles, and as seniors, share their knowledge with incoming freshmen and sophomores. As I am transtitioning off a team right now I am trying to sort through all my contacts, documents, etc. to pass them along to other mentors who will be remaining on the team.

Re: Teams losing lots of seniors
 

Team 25 lost a large number of seniors a couple years back, so we know what its like to have growing pains like that.

The biggest problem with the last batch that graduated was training- they never trained anyone else on the team, leaving a large number of us untrained students to fill up jobs that required experience. It was hard at first, and caused us to develop training programs for new AND current members. While our program will reach a head next year, I'm happy to say that I no longer worry about leaving 25- I have trained or watched others be trained to the point where I no longer need to worry about the future of the team when certain seniors leave.

I highly advise training new members throughout the year, just not at the end when members are leaving, so that when seniors graduate they will be missed, but not needed.

Let me know if you guys need help developing training programs for your new members.

Re: Teams losing lots of seniors
 

I think I will echo the sentiment that it is so hard to lose your leaders, but fantastic when someone new and unexpected steps up to fill the void. We are losing 5 high school seniors, and being a college team, at least 4 college seniors this year. That can make things harder yet when you are losing two sets of leaders, but we all knew that this was coming, and planned accordingly. We selected people to takeover responsibility, or people stepped forward to volunteer. That is on awesome aspect of FIRST, anyone and everyone can and usually has the opportunity to lead.

Re: Teams losing lots of seniors
 

173 is losing 7 (1 being me) seniors. We're losing the base driver, 2 coaches, back up arm driver, 2 heads of pit crew, team captain and basically leaders of the team. We've done our best to try an educate the underclassmen and warn them what they're in for (a little bit better than what our class went through 2 years ago;) ) They're awful quiet and it kinda of scares me sometimes, but some are already rising up to meet the challenge. Also, use your offseason events to your advantage. At offseason, our seniors step back and let the underclassmen do the work (minus one match, we still want to drive one match) It's letting them learn while we're still there to help if they have questions or need anything. We tried backing off a little bit at Championships, but it was really hard, mostly because we didn't want to. We're working on letting go, ok?

Re: Teams losing lots of seniors
 

I count 1293 losing...(counts) four seniors that I can remember.

We're going to miss 'em (one is our main artist-type person, the one behind the main logo and the Ockham's Raizor logo, another is a great builder, another is our webmaster and driver and generic leet haxor, and the last one was our arm operator this year), but I think we're going to keep on rolling.

Re: Teams losing lots of seniors
 

Cyberblue is losing 13 seniors and the incoming applications are not making up for the loss. I am feeling a little pressure.

Re: Teams losing lots of seniors
 

team 56 is losing 5 members i know ill be back next year, and 2 other people that dont do much will probably come to hang out, none of the driver team is seniors the base driver is in 11th now and the arm operator and hp were are in 10th now. and a kid just signed up thats in 9th now hes pretty good at inventor and computer animation programs so we might have an animation next year. so we are set for 2 more years.

Re: Teams losing lots of seniors
 

648 is losing 14 seniors. 4 are 4-year members, 3 are 3-year members, and the rest are either 1- or 2-year members. We have 31 students :ahh: :ahh: That's almost 1/2 :ahh:

Re: Teams losing lots of seniors
 

For some teams, it's not how many you lose. It's what skills you lose. As a senior myself it is especially true.

This year, I had to pass on almost all my tricks and tips on scouting to the sophmores and juniors.(Some tricks can't be pulled off by anyone else) The teams is also losing an electrician and a fabricator. The electrician, is the bigger of the two loses.

Re: Teams losing lots of seniors
 

from what i know about my teams (1270) & (541) were losing about 7 productive seniors both teams are losing their drivers but have back ups. their programmer their captains. the said thing about this is its hard to see them leave but so far about two out of seven of them is coming back next year to be mentors because they know so much they can help out. and give the old mentors a break. its kind of sad but kind of happy to say that I'm no longer cap of 541 but now a mentor of both first teams i look at them like sister teams because 1270 developed out of 541 and we always help each other out. but next year the teams will have to learn how to be strong. and first is getting a pair of new mentors I'm looking forward to see all the team members that are becoming mentors or any thing like that next year so if you see me next year good luck and keep up the GP :)

Re: Teams losing lots of seniors
 

Team 294 is losing two seniors, including myself. Major recruiting spree this summer and fall for next year!

Re: Teams losing lots of seniors
 

That is true. The majority of our team this season consisted of 3 seventh graders, 1 eigth grader, 1 freshman, 3 sophomores, 7 seniors, and 3 mentors. Next year, team captains will be a junior and sophomore. Of course there are going to be some problems, but part of being a team is overcoming them, and I have full confidence that SWAT and other teams will do just that.