[Max Boord]

Originally Posted by Will Gunderson

I am a 2016 FIRST Graduate who is taking a gap year between highschool and college. I am wondering if this is common for FIRST students, or if any would like to share their stories.

I would recommend taking a year off before becoming a mentor unless the team you are mentoring has a well established student mentor program. When I started mentoring 1065 we already had several other high school students come back the next year but I would still have taken the year off in hindsight. Also consider how many hours your team would be meeting and what percent of meetings you would like to attend. Having gone from mentoring a team that meets 1 day a week to a team that meets 7 days a week the difference in workload is pretty significant and was definitely harder to do as a college student.