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Originally Posted by Ian W.
So say what you want, you're lucky that your team has mentors that do all of the nitty gritty stuff for the students, and the students just worry about making money to make a robot. Many teams don't have mentors that care to do, or even know how to do, all of the "behind the scenes" stuff, and on those teams, high school students have to step up and do it, and I have a feeling that it's those teams' students who are complaining, and they have every right to. I shouldn't be worrying about if we have a bus picking us up at the airport in Atlanta, it should just be there "magically" through a mentor's work, not students' work.
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As a member of one of those teams where students do virtually everything, even at the administrative level, I still have to disagree with Ian. I don't think it matters whether you feel you're putting more work into the robot than someone else is, or that you're working harder than they are. If someone else is taking time out of their own busy life to come help you and your team, they deserve your respect and appreciation, no matter what the size of that contribution may be.
Maybe the person who usually does all the administrative work left a week before kickoff. That may have been a breach of faith, it may not, I don't know the circumstances. However, it still stands that that person has been helping your team to take care of all this work has done it for several years. If it weren't for this person, you might have had to do all this
every year. Being bitter when someone who has taken so much out of their own life to help you is very ungrateful, and makes me wonder whether underappreciation was one of the reasons this mentor left in the first place.
With that said, I think that your team has done well in being able to handle all the behind-the-scenes work that goes into running a team. I think that far from "bashing the students," most people would look up to a team like this as a wonderful example of dedication and committment on the part of the students. You just need to keep in mind that just because it may feel like you're doing more work than the mentors, whether that is true or not, they still deserve your respect and gratitude.