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Originally Posted by DampRobot
Maybe this will fall on deaf ears, and if it does, I don't really blame you for not listening. I didn't listen either. But don't mentor when you're in college, at least your first year. FRC will always be there. But you'll only have one shot at figuring out what you're actually like when you take away all the old, external stuff in your life, and start having to make choices about what's actually important to you. As happy as you are to be a student in FRC, being a mentor isn't the same (although it's still awesome), and it can wait. College, and taking one of the last steps on your path to maturity, won't.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ginger Power
I had very little trouble mentoring and volunteering my Freshman year of college. I wouldn't consider myself to be a fantastic student by any means, but I work hard. If you are good at managing your time you can mentor, volunteer, and effectively participate in college activities while also doing well in class. If you can't manage your time correctly you need to realize this and correct for it. The first thing to go for me would be mentoring, then college activities, then volunteering.
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There's opportunity cost in every decision you make, even mentoring. By every metric you listed here, I also "successfully" mentored 5188 for the past 2.5 years. It's still a decision I regret sometimes.
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It's so hard to explain why you shouldn't mentor during your freshmen year (or at all) during college. The profoundness of the college experience is not something you realize immediately. It took me 2-2.5 years to finally realize what I was sacrificing in order to mentor and admit that it wasn't worth it.
For a lot of students heavily invested in FRC, FIRST becomes their social life as well. I believe a lot of these students go through college mentoring and getting decent/good grades in school, thinking that they get to have the best of both worlds. In reality, they're missing out on so much of the college experience, because IMO the things you learn socially in college are just as important as what you learn in the classroom. College has the potential to be the best four years of your life, and the people you meet there can be your closest friends for the rest of your life. Don't miss out on that just because of this weird addiction to FRC that we all have.
As tempting as it may be to do otherwise, please just take your freshmen year off. Join clubs. Hang out with your freshmen floor at 2AM doing absolutely nothing (or things you probably shouldn't be doing). Try rushing a fraternity and joining Greek life (it's the single most rewarding decision I've made in my entire life). Join other engineering clubs (Formula SAE, Shell Ecomarathon, etc) and see how the skills you learned in FRC apply to the real world. There is so much more this world has to offer, and college really is the best place to experience it all. Don't miss out on this just for something as trivial as FRC.