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Originally Posted by JesseK
The point was that for sustainability reasons each individual team should be run like a small tech firm. I agree that the philosophy doesn't mean the mentors make all decisions and do all of the work*. Mentors are definitely needed at the critical decisions in order to prevent a single group of students from dictating or ruining every other students' experience in a season. Sometimes this has to happen forcefully, depending on the culture of the community & the students in a given season.
The level of how much involvement is an art - we certainly have been overly-involved in the past - but as a team gains experience they'll find the right balance for themselves.
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I agree that mentors are needed to be present at some of the major decisions, but not all. We at programming have a single mentor, and he does only a little more than we need him to. We do all of our own programming, and even teach the freshman programmers what they need to know before the season starts, based on the last year's code and WPILib API. However, they do not need to be "forceful" in any way. The students should be allowed to make their own mistakes to the extent possible, as in a tech firm, to continue the analogy. Even if one group is in charge of the others, this is not as much of a problem as you make it out to be in most situations. As long as nothing that would horribly harm the team is prevented, the students should have as much free reign as possible.
"As a team gains experience they'll find the right balance for themselves" rubs me the wrong way. If the team is largely mentor-run, the students will not be able to make the decision about what balance they want. That just seems.... wrong...
Quote:
Originally Posted by JesseK
*Except leading the fundraising team ... I have yet to meet a student who successfully solicits a large business for fundraising without significant mentor involvement...
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Our team actually has almost zero mentor involvement in regards to fundraising, etc. We have a large "marketing" team that is competent enough to make their own decisions to benefit the team appropriately. They have successfully funded the majority of the team's cash needs for the past few years, with little mentor involvement.