Quote:
Originally Posted by cadandcookies
Frankly, I'm not sure I made the right choice mentoring my first year of college. It worked for me, and it worked for both of the teams I helped (both teams made it to their state tournaments), but I can think of so many ways it could have gone wrong. If I had a heavier schedule or more difficult classes, studying on the bus on the way to help my teams wouldn't have been possible. If tournaments didn't fall in the right places relatives to my quizzes and tests, it would have been impossible for me to make it to their regionals. I ended up in the right place, at the right time, with the right schedule, and if anything had been off, it wouldn't have worked.
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The key for me was realizing that I could not be the mentor I wanted to be the first year I worked with a team. Heck, I hesitate to say that what I did could even be called mentoring-- I was trying to do a combination of help the team, help the students grow as individuals, and help myself grow by learning how to and how not to mentor. Over the course of the year, I realized that why I wanted to be a mentor had very little to do with winning, and only a bit to do with building a robot-- I found value in mentoring because I felt I was genuinely positively impacting the students on the team's lives, and looking back, I classify that as a valid reason for me to work with a team my freshman year of college. I may not be the theoretical best possible mentor for my team-- I'm too young, I live too far away, and I don't have the technical expertise for most aspects of the robot, but I filled a role that needed to be filled, and positively impacted the team, the students, the mentors, and myself in my own small way, while still managing to have a great time in college and keeping good grades.
I don't think there's a correct way of handling alumni mentoring-- it depends so much on the team's situation and that of the alum to generalize. I think most healthy, consistent teams can deal without having alumni coming back immediately, but for some teams that can be the only thing keeping them from folding.
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I think what you've described of your own experience is a good case outcome of college students being mentors. One important thing that you didn't bring out is that it also takes someone ready to step into that role; if you weren't mature and level-headed enough, and focused, things may not have turned out so well. I think even within just a single team, there can be some alum who are ready to hit the ground running as a mentor for their own team or another, others who should take a year off, and others yet who should take more time off. Being a college mentor involves several dimensions of balancing act, and a number of different skills that one may not be used to practicing, and some people just aren't ready for that as teenagers.
I think a big part of what good college mentors do is growing themselves as mentors; they have something to contribute from their prior experience with FIRST, but they're obviously not contributing at the level of mentors who've been in industry for 20 years. They're simultaneously learning more they can contribute at school, and learning to contribute more effectively by example of their fellow mentors. But they also have the experience of having been in high school recently, and can connect to the students differently, and can be impactful role models of a slightly different type.