[LisaGinkgo]

I agree with what most people have been saying about holding workshops for new members, maintaining a positive attitude, and trying to make sure that new members are engaged and feel able to contribute. Additionally, I think it's important to make rookies feel that they are a part of the team from the start. My team has older members talk to them and teach them, rather than leaving all of the instruction to mentors. Team-building activities can be great, but from my experience, it's really important to make sure that new members also get a chance to work with and learn from their teammates, as it allows them to get to know them better as well as showing them that the older members make mistakes and thus won't judge them for being confused or making mistakes themselves. We always try to emphasize that you don't need to know anything when you join the team and that all you need is to be willing to learn.

That said, different people are inspired in different ways. Some people feel most comfortable having someone helping them along and checking their work to start with (in which case we've found it's best to let them work with you--tell them what needs to get done and give them step-by-step instructions on how to do it and why each step is necessary if there's time), but others prefer to be more independent earlier on. My favorite memory from my freshman year was being assigned to build a prototype for a frisbee intake partway through Build Season. I was working with a bunch of other rookies, and we worked essentially on our own. Yes, we messed up a lot, but we also knew that what we were creating was being created by us, and that with every iteration, it got closer to becoming something that would work, which was something I don't think many of us had experienced before. It was some of the most fun I've ever had, and even though we never had time to actually use it, creating a mechanism that actually worked was one of the most inspiring things I had ever experienced. And inspiration and a sense that you're learning something seem to be the things that keep people on a team.

Because different people find different things inspiring, if possible, we've found that it works to have multiple types of activities open. We allow rookies to work with mentors or more experienced members if they want to, but also give them independent projects if they'd prefer that. People will eventually gravitate towards the areas and learning environments in which they feel most comfortable.

People like to feel like they're contributing to the robot. If you have a machine shop, the rookies on my team last year enjoyed fabrication. They didn't have to have a strong understanding of robotics in order to contribute, but they learned these concepts as they went because they usually ended up assembling the mechanisms they made, so they got to see how they worked. There were also immediate, tangible results when they worked, which I think helped.