Since this thread has been bumped, I guess I'll chime in with my story. (There's a TL;DR farther down though too)
I started FRC in late 2009 (Just after the build/competition season ended) as a senior in High School. And, as Wooide Flowers puts it, I "caught the bug", and was totally hooked. So when I took a year off after high school, I basically just worked part time and did FRC.
I started school again in 2011, with 17 credits a semester in a technical college course in machine tool. I kept on working part time, and doing FRC as sort of a Junior Mentor. As you can imagine, this made my schedule very tight, but really, the stress was manageable, I just got used to spending almost no time at home besides sleeping (if that
)
Now on to 2012-2013. I kept on doing all the same stuff; 17 credits, part time work, and FRC. But then, In late 2012, I picked up an FTC team. We had a couple of students at a local high school who wanted to start a team, and reached out to BadgerBOTS, needing a mentor. A mentor (the kind of mentor you should be careful around because he'll convince you to do something crazy) thought I would be good for the role.
So, being in too good of a mood to be safely making sound decisions, I said yes.
So there I was, 17 credits, working part-time, and mentoring FRC and FTC. Eventually, the stress from all of that did end up getting to me. I didn't have any time to myself. If I wasn't at school or work I was working with FTC because that season was in full swing. And then there was the overlap between the FRC and FTC seasons which made it even crazier.
I had a bit of a multi-day breakdown, where I considered dropping the FTC team, or dropping the work (I was living at home, so didn't strictly
need the money). But after a bit of that, I got a hold of myself, and pulled it together. I had committed to doing these things, and I had to see them through.
Just before our regional, (and the end of the FTC season) I ended up leaving my job for an unrelated reason, and things got much easier. But then I started putting in many more hours per week for FRC.
TL;DR: Mentored FRC and FTC while working part time and running a full class load in college, went crazy for a while, but made it through.
Mentoring while in school is tough. But honestly, it is doable.
That all said, 1306 has since put in a rule that students can't come back to mentor until after their first year of college, so they can acclimate to college life, and then figure out how to juggle FRC and school.
Overall, I'm glad I did keep on mentoring during school. It taught me a lot about time management, responsibility, and keeping myself sane
But I can totally understand that some people may not have the tolerance for stress that I do.
I would like to say though, that if you plan to come back and mentor, make sure you really have something to pass on to the students. Sure the basic FRC knowledge you get from being a student will help some of the newer kids on the team, but it takes a lot more than that to be a mentor. I can honestly say that I've come a very long way from how I was when I started "mentoring" just a couple years ago. There is a much bigger changeover from student to mentor than you think.