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Originally Posted by Lij2015
This is all good info, and i wish our team could simply have uncaring people drop on their own!
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Tungrus
Murphy's law...this ^^^ will never happen!
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Not never - we had a bunch leave on their own. We had the same problem this year - more people interested in joining than our facility could handle. We didn't have any written application other than the usual medical and safety forms. What we did do was have "tryouts". Each mentor and several of the returning varsity team members (who did not have to try out) came up with challenges ranging from cutting out a piece of cardboard according to a blueprint to writing down how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich to building a tower out of blocks to modifying the standard arduino sweep() program to do a couple of fancier things. We ran tryouts in "stations" and graded both on aptitude and attitude. The tryouts were available on about eight evenings, and most students could get through it in six. About one-third of the original applicants never finished the process. We only had to "cut" a few more - and those were selected from the whiners and distractors. We would have also cut based on too low a "good enough" standard, but those all fell under the others anyway.
The attitude of this year's team was an order of magnitude better than last year's. As one of my co-workers said when told the story: personnel is policy. Select motivated people to start, and it won't take nearly as much to keep them going. We also had a much lower attrition rate from startup to the stop build than in previous years (<10% vice about 20%). I don't think we lost anyone between stop build and CMP.
Oh, yes, we used aptitude plus requests plus needs plus a few personal rules (e.g. boy friend and girl friend must be in separate departments) to select departments.