[stingray27]

In general, it looks like students have a tendency to favor the Thurs-Sat model where mentors favor the Fri-Sunday model (IMO)

The vacation days are super valuable for a mentor and missing work for a competition takes those valuable days away.

For a student, missing school seems to be a bit less of a problem. Personally, missing school for a competition taught me how to be responsible for my own learning and how to arrange study groups outside of the classroom. My fellow teammates and I would study and work on missed class work together and I actually learned quite a bit from these external study sessions. Now this might not work for everyone - some students may learn 10x better in the classroom. At the same time, I really needed Sunday as a rest day. Most involved students are on their feet for days, using their brains constantly, and get very little sleep. If I didn't have Sunday to recover, sleep and do all of my homework, my grades would have drastically dropped.