[SJaladi]

I started mentoring 1923 as a Freshman MechE student with very little prior FIRST experience (I mentored my younger brothers FLL team for a year). I did however have a lot of experience with shop tools, design and fabrication, as well as some of the electronics we commonly use. My first day with the team was kickoff in 2013 and I hit the ground running that build season. There was a bit of a learning curve with the student-mentor relationship side (how to be an effective mentor etc.) but I felt fairly comfortable with the technical side pretty quickly. Now after my third year, I feel like I'm starting to hit my stride as a good mentor, and not just a robot builder, but I still have a long way to go to stack up against some of the greats out there.

To answer the original question directly, I had no FRC experience, but plenty of technical skill. I was at the very least competent with every tool the team owned and usually experienced enough to teach students, I was good with Solidworks, though we didn't really use it til this year, and I was good with electronics. I picked up really quickly on pneumatics and the only place I still lack proficiency is programming. Strategic design was something I've learned along the way and I still have quite a bit to learn in that regard. In my opinion to be an effective technical mentor, you just need to have the right attitude, a willingness to learn, and some basic level of design knowledge.