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Originally Posted by Alaina
hey all,
This year has been very difficult for me. I am the only student who has been on my team for more than one season. And even current seniors who were involved last year mainly helped at the end of the season, so they don't know a whole lot about building a robot.
I think I have about 6 new members who are the slightest bit enthusiastic about FIRST (they're all freshmen, so that kind of makes me optimistic for 2008, but that's not my point). I was the only upper-classman (out of 9) at my team's kickoff party. Then later some mentors showed up, and we strategized while the freshmen played video games.
It's not like I don't tell my team how the build season works. I send out at least 2 emails to the robotics list (yay for technology schools) every day. Whether we meet at lunch or after school most people don't show up. Yesterday we were supposed to have a brainstorming session yesterday and I was the only one there. It was extremely disappointing.
We currently don't have an engineering mentor. The engineer who owns our workspace is leaving on Monday to be in England for 3 weeks. I'm sure he'll let us access our workspace but it's going to be a struggle to get any good designs without an expert opinion. And it seems like my team just wants to sit around until he gets back!
What disappoints me the most is how my teachers don't want to spend any time outside of school to work on this. I thought they were here to help us?
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oh god, I have almost the opposite problem in a weird way. Instead of being the highschoolers not being motivated it is the mentors who aren't motivated. Well aren't motivated to do certain things. For instance we currently have on the order of 40 mentor college students and 12 highschool students. The leaders of the team have no problem recruiting on campus, however for all of that publicity stuff, such as recruiting and mentoring Highschool students, well there is currently discussion about making a new PR position on the exec board to do that. After all they are engineering majors and don't know how to do that. Thus they don't have to. Also some IDIOT started advertising that we are really a college FIRST team that keeps HS students aroung "just to drive the robot".
Now I'm being told that well, designing the robot is more for college students skill level, programming and wiring the robot is too hard and better done by college students, Highschool students don't need to be at the kickoff. However we will gladly let them do the animation and reports. I'm at the rate of receiving one or two of these off hand comments at every meeting.
The ironic thing, our main organization advisor will take a look at what these skilled mentors want to do and then go back to his shop and do something else similar but might work. Our skilled mentors probably won't help much anyway unless he instructs them at every step.
I'll admit I've been guity of this from time to time, and this isn't entirely unusual for the team. This year is worse than the last 5 years I've been on the team.