Quote:
Originally Posted by sanddrag
Here's another element. Some teams are fortunate to have their student membership comprised primarily of students who do FIRST Robotics as their only extracurricular activity outside of class. Our students are not this way, and it often is a problem. Many different commitments are competing for their time. They are playing sports, running track, racing mountain bikes, debating in mock trials, playing musical instruments, completing senior projects, writing newspapers, publishing yearbooks, and taking as many as 5 AP classes.
The issue is simple. When the build season is extended, those of us who do more than just FIRST robotics cannot compete with those who have nothing else going on. We all can sideline our normal responsibilities for a few weeks and play catchup later, but there's no way we can sustain that for months.
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This argument plays
exactly both ways. Our team is filled with students--and mentors--like this. And I've noticed a trend: particularly in students, but also some in mentors, the ones that don't want a longer build tend to have activities that would conflict more if so, usually because there's no/less overlap currently. (The trend seems to somewhat hold in this thread, though not entirely.) Most everyone else views a longer season as the ability show up less often, do more other activities, and still actively participate in FIRST. Why?
Because we set that schedule, and that's what we want.
FIRST is about nurturing students to become these amazing leaders: how does making them put their lives on hold--their Boy Scout work, their FBLA, their music, etc--for 2 months of the school year help that? In reality, many of our kids don't do this, and it mitigates what they get out of FIRST. It drives many, many, many students away.
I've lost count of the number of students who come in excited, and then dart to VEX when they find out how time-concentrated FRC is. Why? Because they have things to do 2-4 nights a week. Because they have lives, homework, work...just like the mentors we lose do.
This ends up burdening the students and mentors who stay even more, which is what brings us close to burn out.
For 7 years, I've watched great students and adults walk out the door at the explanation "6 weeks". And not that I don't like VEX, but I want those people! Our only electrical mentor (too many have been scared off) is in a similar boat--not available for FRC as much as he'd like. Every year we have electrical problems, and we always struggle to mentor students interested in the field the way they'd like. We've lost a lot of them.
This year, we got a great mechanical engineer--awesome guy, great with the kids, did our first FEA analysis ever--but he's just not available enough to stay with a 6 week sprint. We haven't been able to engage him because he always feels behind when he comes. I end up doing basically everything he could be doing--that he wants to do--instead of concentrating on how to mentor my strategy team. Now both of my fields aren't up to snuff, and it's cost us a lot of inspirational opportunities. Not competitive opportunities. (Very different, and we basically got
the competitive opportunity this year.) Inspirational: I know my students aren't growing the way they could be with more downtime, more mentorship, more one-on-one availability, more money left for other activities. I know I've lost a lot of students because of it.
As a non-school team, many of our mentors and families have rather long commutes: one our key mentor + student families drives an hour each way,
every day in build. Their story is far from unique--I drive 3 hours each way over the weekend and back & forth on Wednesdays for build seasons I spend on campus. Wouldn't I love to just come down weekends? Not building a practice bot would have freed up at 3 weeks throughout this full season.
In short, a more open build season would allow us to set our schedule based on our team's needs. I am confident that we can enforce with discipline (though Gary may want to give back his key) and actually save ourselves the practice bot time. Because we already do set our schedule, we already send people home, and we understand the benefits:
- Recruit more students who shy from the intense time commitment
- Retain and positively impact students who want to do other activities in build
- Recruit, retain and fully utilize mentors who cannot commit to 4-7 days/week.
- Cut down on commutes and concentrated commitment for just about everyone
- Save loads and loads of money on the practice bot, expedited shipping, and just-in-case-buying that can be put towards more inspirational efforts
- Teach our kids (and mentors) further discipline! How to stay on schedule and not kill yourself with FIRST.
- More time to practice and help other teams, both during the season (collaborative weekends) and at events when we're not scrambling to update the competition bot.
- More opportunity to help other teams at on-season scrimmages, and all in all just "raise the floor" of FIRST.
EDIT: All that said...yeah, basically what Jared said.