[Jon Stratis]

Every team dynamic is different. You need to do what fits best for your team... and I would start by listening to the more experienced mentors on your own team. It's hard to make the transition from student to mentor, especially when it happens immediately. It's easy to be sucked back into the "student" role, as you have a bunch of friends on the team, and most of the students are probably closer in age to you than the other mentors.

Using my own team as an example, nothing gets done without student involvement. As a mentor group, we pushed the team to explore tablet scouting options this year. They embraced it in concept, but were slow to adopt and figure out how to make it work. As a mentor, I stepped in and helped them figure out the basics, by taking an off the shelf system developed by another local team and setting it up as an example. The metrics that were present on it were completely non-sensical, but having that example in place the students could see how it would operate at the event, I could walk them through the setup procedure, and then they could develop the actual metrics and set it up for themselves.

One of the hardest parts of being a mentor, in my opinion, is knowing when to step back. You may look at an issue, know how to solve it, and know that you could get it done quickly and easily... but also know that you need to hand it off to a student, coach them through it, and that it'll take 3 times as long and may not end up being what you had envisioned.