[Joseph Smith]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

It's easy to say you would just spend "lots of time on Netflix" if you didn't mentor a team, but you're totally missing his point. College is one of the best times in your life to try new things, meet new people, and challenge yourself in different ways. If you're putting aside all that college has to offer to try and mentor a team in college, you're missing out on these opportunities. Or worse, you try and juggle robotics + regular extracurricular activities and your grades suffer as a result.

I guess I didn't really make it clear that my situation is not quite the typical college schedule. At Kettering, we rotate every three months between school and work. With my schedule, I have school from October-December, work from January-March, school April-June, and work July-September. This means that during the entire build season and the first few weeks of competition season, I'm living at home and working full time at a co-op job. During build season I go to work, go right from work to robotics, then go home. Sure, I get less sleep then I'd like, but it doesn't affect my work. When the work term ends and I go back to school, I'm not involved in the team at all for those three months, just going to competitions on the weekends to watch. I agree wholeheartedly that mentoring while going to college would be extremely taxing, and not recommended. However, my situation is different. This is why I said that everyone's situation is different and blanket statements like "nobody should mentor during their first year of college" don't apply to everyone.

Also, a ton of people at Kettering were on FIRST teams and many still mentor, so we enjoy going to competitions and watching webcasts together.