Quote:
Originally Posted by Zebra_Fact_Man
Maybe I'm missing something here, but how does a team like 27 RUSH, who just won the Chairman's Award at MSC, "need" 2-3 mentors? You guys were at Livonia with us and you had more adults wearing team shirts than my entire team!
If you guys need mentors, what chances does a team like mine have?
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You don't quite have the same perspective as I do, and I understand that you may be frustrated by the idea that such a highly regarded team "needs" help. Rather than "needing" help, this year was the most frustrating year for many teams, but for us it was especially taxing. Overall, this year, by both Mrs. Hughes, our team captain, and our lead engineering mentor, it's been considered as tough a year for us as was 1998. Personally, I couldn't go into detail about that year, but that year was a very, very tough year for the mentors and students, in part that the build site was very cold, making build season absolutely miserable.
This year, with only a couple full-time mentors, our robot was left without us knowing if it would even move on stop build day. The first day of Northern Lights, we proved that we could move, and we put on our shooter, in a unique position right on top of where we were going to have a 30pt climb, and we had to seriously rebound to achieve the success we achieved at the following competitions. (We've even got a 5-hour time lapse of that first day of northern Lights in our pits
here). We've had an unusually high amount of drama, which has been taxing on many of the members on the teams, taking away time from focusing on our larger goals.
Actually, 75% of our mentors are either alum or parents of alum and students. We're very lucky to have many of them, and they have really been integral to making this past year such a success. Unfortunately, at the same time, we've lost many mentors to time and jobs. Two years ago, we lost Anthony, one of our most important technical mentors, who left us for his job at NASA, down in Texas (who's now mentoring 118 with another alum).
Additionally, this year, the Programming SubTeam had to be very independent. Last year we had some help and were able to work from literally no knowledge of programming a robot and poorly created code, to a Eliminations worthy robot at the Championships. This year, we had no definite Programming mentor, but we were able to, with the knowledge of WPI's vision code from last year, develop code to track frisbees on the ground, seen
here(It's running on our T-shirt cannon; our drive train wasn't finished until later in the season). It was quite a cool sight, our chassis following discs like a trail of breadcrumbs.
It was very similar, this year, when I wrote our Scouting App. Last year had some code worth looking at, but I had to learn, starting 4 weeks into build season(I had a high priority before then), all about Objective C, with only some knowledge of Java. And then I had to create a working model before Northern Lights, so that I could focus my sights elsewhere, and help with our Chairman's Presentation. Fortunately, we developed a backup system, so when the relatively untested iPad app failed us, our backup system stepped in and, with a gigantic effort by one of our students, we had effective scouting data which made me feel much better about the situation. Eventually, I was able to bring it up to a suitable, bug-free state that achieved the minimum we needed, and we'll be working to make it even better as summer comes around.
So, this year has been a year that truly fit two of our sayings:
Never Give Up and
Fail Faster, Learn More, Focus, And Execute. This year, we lost some very strong leadership in our seniors from last year, and we've lost mentorship that we once had. But we didn't give up, when we knew there were spots to be filled. This year's seniors had to step up for the team, as well as others, and we all did, and we made sure this year wasn't going to fall short of where we wanted to be. This year, we had failures. We lost mentorship, but we made up for it in leadership, and everyone learned. Through each competition, we slowly creeped up to the top, focusing and executing on smaller levels, whilst learning so much each and ever day. Champs came around, and it was go time. No time for sitting around, we gave it everything we had, and it didn't matter who Walt P. Havenstein gave the CCA to. It didn't matter that we made it to CMP eliminations for the 10th+ time in a row, and still have never made it out of our division. We achieved what we wanted to, and we're OK with that.
We're looking for mentorship not because we want to be the team that's the best to ever have existed, but rather to reach a point where we can help other teams as we have been doing, through our 6 part sustainability system, such as your team. Just because almost all of our parents wear RUSH shirts, means that we're very strongly supported by our community and our family. We integrate everyone we're connected to into our team, so we can be sustainable. Many of our parents stopped in during build season and contributed a lot towards the team, becoming part time, if not for all intents and purposes, full time mentors, when we've never asked them to.
Keep in mind that this is but my own perspective, and not representative of Team RUSH as a whole. My passion for the team knows no bounds, and this year has been the biggest learning experience I've ever had, of which I will be forever indebted to the rest of the team, students and mentors alike.