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Originally Posted by Haywire909
Hi, I am from the Haywire team in Pocatello Idaho. We need to know what the best mix of help is for the designing and building of our robot. We have access to a wide variety of different help, but we don't know who to ask.  Will someone please help us?  |
My answer? Anyone you can get!!!
It's great that you have access to a lot of different people! Try to recruit from wherever you can, so you can prepare for the inevitable paring down of people. As much as you explain it to them, some people who agree to do the season may not be able to stick around because of other constraints (and you don't want to be trying to find these people during build season, because you'll be too crazed with other stuff).
I feel that the best way to handle this is to hand out a rough timeline for the year and explain how many hours are usually necessary. Another team may have something like this already made up for you to work off of (hopefully someone reads this and responds with one for you).
Also, just because someone might be of a particular profession doesn't mean that they can't help out in other areas. The trick is taking a good look at the "human capital" (aka people) you have and utilizing them to the fullest without overdoing it.
For this, I would create a questionnaire for all mentors agreeing to the season, particulary asking them for their education, past job titles or experience, groups/associations that they belong to, and their hobbies. Not only are you getting their contact info, but you're able to look back and make connections (in building the robot, but also in networking and fundraising!) you never would have guessed by just looking at someone. (This also doubles as an easy way to make a new mentor comfortable: since you already knows he likes to waterski from the questionnaire, next time he comes to a meeting you can say something other than "Hey, nice weather we're having".)
Finally, there's really no one-size-fits-all answer to this.
Here's a link to a thread from a while back that had teams describe their "mentor makeup", or "what their mentors do when they're not working on the robot". As you can see, no two teams are completely alike in who they have helping them, and all of the teams that responded have participated (hence they've built a robot), not to mention many of them do quite well for themselves.
Hope this helps. Good luck!