[ahartnet]

Some advice as someone that only participated my senior year of high school but then immediately started mentoring in college:

It'll be nearly impossible for students to see you as a mentor and not a peer simply due to the small age difference. It'll help however not knowing any of the students on the team. It'll likely also be difficult to balance the desire to be a peer with the responsibility of being a mentor

It'll take some time to learn how you want to be a mentor and not be a "student" team member. There are guidelines you can use from the mentor handbook in what you should or shouldn't do as a mentor - but every team will draw different boundaries. My first several years of mentoring I took a very hands off method of mentoring because I know how much I appreciated being able to do any and everything as a high school student myself. I relied heavily on asking leading questions to get students to come up with the same idea I did without me telling them it. While my method of mentoring has changed considerably over the past 3-4 years, I'm still glad I took that method of mentoring as a college student

My personal take on mentoring is to focus on helping students feel accountable for their work. If students feel accountable for the success of whatever it is they're working on, then I want to be right there next to them working with it on them, showing them new ideas, how other people have done it, how I would do it, etc. If students don't feel accountable (such as they feel someone else on the team will take care of it, whether it's another student or a mentor) then I want to be right there next to them trying to figure out how to change that. Again though, I think the small age difference will make it difficult to achieve the "authority" needed to really do this.

This may be a double doozy - 1st know that how you see your team function as a student may be way different than how your mentors see the team function. There's a lot that mentors take care of behind the scenes. 2nd (and I'm sure you already know this) but there's no right way to run a team and so if you are helping to mentor a different team and don't necessarily like how it's run, focus more on what you can bring to the table and what you can learn from others on the team rather than how to change the team. But also don't be afraid to shop around to find the team that best fits with what's important to you.

Lastly but most importantly - don't be afraid to take a year or four off from the competition and come back to it later. You can always still keep FIRST as part of your life by volunteering.