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Originally Posted by ttldomination
I'm curious how you manage to let people participate in both but still drill-down and build skills and interest?
For example, a freshman student is participating in both technical and non-technical activities. How do you balance which activities take priority? Is it entirely up to the team member or is it more team driven?
- Sunny G.
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We don't operate like most times. We meet 5, 6, or 7 days a week year round. We might take a week off every 4-5 months or so normally for finals and things like that. However we don't have any required meetings either. People that want to be there all the time can be and people that just want to get a taste of the action can do that as well. Not everyone needs or wants the same things out of the team. We also don't have any assigned titles. Team members take up roles and we have plenty of leaders on the team but there aren't elections or appointments or anything similar. Subteams aren't defined we have students who take up leading efforts on the robot and within the team but often it's a "next person up" type attitude to who is working on what. If electrical needs to get done, who ever is in the room is often learning electrical and making crimps.
Like I said the whole team shifts in what we are working on. Largely during build season we are working on technical things and fighting to get the robot done (with a small group doing the Chairman's submission). Once the off-season comes we re-focus on outreach along with some scheduled technical workshop times (like this week everyone that wants to is doing
CAD training). Right before off-season events we'll do robot maintenance but we don't do as many technical summer projects as we probably should or I would like.
The fall has always been a bit messy for us honestly. With new students, and running competitions things get a little strange. We aren't competing in VEX this year to see if we can focus a bit more of our time internally while still being able to support the competitions and outreach efforts that we do in the fall. We turn it around during build season and the team always finds a way to come together but we're trying to find a way to make that happen faster.
To specifically answer your question we had several dedicated freshman this past year who have all for the most part done a little bit of both sides. From doing presentations at outreach events, working on the twitter feed, managing the "How I Work Articles", graphics design, or working on web streams at events to learning how to program, CAD, repair the robot, drive at off-season events, etc. We'll try to push people a bit out of their comfort zone when ever possible.