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Originally Posted by Libby K
How are you, a student with basically the same knowledge base, inspiring someone to go into the career path they choose - are you lending them your industry experience? No. Giving them advice on university & internships? I sure hope not, you haven't been through it. You need some sort of partnership, even if it's just a little bit. Mentors are more than just Wiring101 teachers. There should be a connection there, helping foster something new in the students throughout the FIRST process.
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I feel that one of the duties of a mentors is to provide perspective for the students while making their career choices. One of our students was saying last week that she wanted to go work for Google or Apple so she could "do cool things" and be able to have her own patents. I asked if she had considered entrepreneurship and described two friends who's startups (different companies) were purchased by a large competitor and would several Mega$ make up for working for a company no one has ever hear of. I also set her straight about who gets most of the financial benefits from a patent one is awarded when working as an employee. She still wants to go into the STEM field but now has a different and more accurate perspective. Can you students do this for each other?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Libby K
How is it that you know what the students did vs. what the mentors did on that team? If you're not on the team, you don't know them or what they do.
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Every time that I have
personally heard someone say the phrase "the mentors built their robot" about one of our local powerhouse teams, the people saying it were jealous that they did not have the same resources yet they were not willing to work to get those resources. They were also wrong. I have spoken to all of our local powerhouse teams and in every case there were students who knew details that only the person doing the work could know.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mentorDon
I don't have a problem with mentors helping students. You could bring every NASA engineer as far as I'm concerned. My problem is with NASA or other large corporations supplying the manufacturing time and materials for some of these robots. I wrote a letter last year to First expressing my thoughts about these $1,000,000 robots. If the rules were changed so that all materials and manufacturing time were included in the cost of the robot, that would level the playing field for all teams. Time to eliminate the free ride from major sponsors.
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Life is not fair. What is wrong with the students learning to deal with unfairness in a creative and constructive way?