Quote:
Originally Posted by DevenStonow
Now, obviously, I know how absurd/rude/ridiculous that comment was, and normally I shake off stuff like that and don't let it get to me, but it's really got me thinking: Outside of the idea of being a mentor (in the educational/inspirational sense) what does mentoring a FIRST team in college have that other college extracurriculars don't?
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Last year, I helped a loose collection of high-schoolers with no prior engineering experience at all go from disorganized meetings in a college community center to a functioning team with a robot that was able to hold its own at competition, and which made it to worlds. Several students are now planning to pursue careers in engineering.
That experience was more valuable for me (and, I hope, for the students) than anything I have done before in my life (and I also work on projects that I think even that guy would consider
"real").
So, yeah, don't let it get to you. FIRST is important, it is rewarding, and it is every bit as "real" as any other extracurricular you could participate in. It's one thing to hear Dean Kamen talk about "changing culture re: STEM" in a vacuum, where it sounds (admittedly) cheesy and overblown. It's another thing to participate in it, and realize that he's right: FIRST
works. It worked for me, and it certainly seems to be working for the students on the teams I'm mentoring. It would not work without mentors.
As mentioned a few posts earlier, "changing lives" isn't just a couple of impressive-sounding words, it's very much a real result of what you do as a mentor on a FIRST team.