Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew Lawrence
I wasn't going to comment on this thread, but this point is an important one to me. Having been captain of a mostly student run team for all four years of high school, I can honestly say that I hated it. I had nobody on the team to learn from, no experience greater than my own to reference, and the only way the team learned was by seeing our mistakes finally unfold at the competition. I designed the robot, built the robot, and led the team, and I wish I could have had 50-50 mentor/student involvement more than anything. I would have happily sacrificed two of my four seasons to have someone more experienced in these areas work with me. When I see teams talk about how proud they are of their student-run team, I cannot help but feel sorry for them and the lies they keep telling themselves. I was not proud of my robot that scored 0 inner tubes my entire first season. I was not proud of red carding our alliance because we didn't know any better. I was not proud of resorting to defense at 8 of my 10 competitions because we couldn't score. I was not proud of losing. The FIRST program is about the students, but what makes or breaks a team is the mentors. I was very fortunate to have some of the best mentors in FIRST reach out to me via Chief Delphi and social networks and help me along the way, and the effect they had on me and my team showed in our 2014 robot, the first robot made by my team that I would consider "competitive" in our history since at least 2003. We went from an unsuccessful, non-inspiring team to one that inspired its students and built an effective, competitive design that performed well in competition, not because of me, but because of the amazing mentors from these other teams who were kind enough to share their knowledge and experience with us.
I see all of these people in this thread complaining about mentors being too involved and teams who have more resources than them, when I suffered through almost four years of brutal, uninspiring failure because my team matched the "ideal" that these other students and mentors claim FIRST should be more like. I've become a mentor now because I don't want any student to have to experience FRC the way I did. I remember coming home crying at some point in the build season each year, telling my parents how badly I wanted to quit because it was too much and we were too unprepared. This program is about the experience for students, and nobody should have to experience a team without sufficient mentor involvement. Nobody in FIRST should promote the type of team that lets these kinds of things happen, and to those who still think that sufficient mentor involvement is bad, HS freshman me would like to politely ask you to leave.
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I don't think there's many people here who are arguing for a 100% student team... the whole point of the program is to get mentors and students together. That said, there is tremendous opportunity for a student-led team which has mentors to advise them as they go. My team is student-led. The students make almost all the decisions. Mentors do the purchases, are responsible for selecting team captains (with student input), determining who letters. Those are the only times we get to actually make decisions. The rest of the time, we give advise, we teach, we provide options or feedback on ideas, and we make sure everyone is safe.
I've seen teams that have only a single teacher "working" with them. While what they can accomplish with no professional help is impressive (seriously, you have to put it in perspective and not try to compare it to what teams with more resources have done at that point), I can only imagine what it's like going through the season without someone to lean on. Even as a mentor, if I was the only one working with my team, I would feel completely overwhelmed. If I come across one of those teams at an event I'm working at, I try to give them a little extra attention, assistance, and guidance throughout the event.