Quote:
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.
*Except leading the fundraising team ... I have yet to meet a student who successfully solicits a large business for fundraising without significant mentor involvement...
|
Actually, our finance team, to my knowledge, is pretty much entirely students. We have enough money each year to go to multiple competitions and buy things almost willy-nilly (although I try not to buy anything we don't need).
Dead horse thread though. Most people like more mentor involvement, and only a few people like completely student-run teams. We are the latter and do okay. Mostly it's because our programmers tend to be really good (as we come from a computer-heavy area) and don't need help, and there is a severe lack of mechanical adults (as we come from a computer-heavy area) so we can't even get mentors. I am looking for some during the summer though.
That being said, being able to design a robot and actually build it has played a huge role in my decision to become an engineer. Having more mentors would be nice to point out mistakes or suggest things would be fantastic, but I am more inspired by a robot that I know I had a say in actually moving around than one that I knew would work anyway. I never liked building from the Lego kits more than once.