I think we've gotten off onto two different tracks here.
On the topic of mentoring in college, I would suggest that we use
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...ad.php?t=47004 which is still at least sporadically active and covers all of the reasons in this thread and a few others besides.
On the topic of engineering competitions in college (note that I did not say robotics competitions, and I'll go into why), there are quite a few. I know that at my school, I can think of 16 off the top of my head, and those are teams, some of whom change competitions. 16 separate teams, covering everything from on the water (concrete canoe) to over the water (steel bridge) to on the road (Formula SAE, Supermileage) to offroad (Baja SAE, SAE Clean Snowmobile) to in the air (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, SAE Aero Design, concrete airplane). And for those of you keeping count at home, I didn't get to quite a few teams, and even if I did I'd probably miss a few that I have limited knowledge of. 'Nuff said.
Now, why limit yourself to robotics competitions? Sure, you know them quite well. But you're also depriving yourself of the opportunity to grow in another direction. I've been on the SAE Aero Design team for 5 years now, but my senior design project is the NASA Lunabotics competition. (Aren, if you're going to that competition, we should meet up sometime.) I've learned a lot about teaming, flight, crashing (
), and dealing with (lack of) success from the Aero team that I really don't think I picked up in FRC.
Sometimes, getting out of that comfort zone is the best thing that can happen to you.
Oh, and protip: Two or more engineering competitions at once and you're slightly crazy. Two or more with anything above a freshman's homework level (or that of a senior with senioritis) and you can remove the "slightly" from that. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some homework to get back to...