[Emily Pease]

Your team advisor is probably stretched very thin; he has to accomodate many different people, including high school students, whose ideal working hours are anywhere from 3-9, and college students, who do much of the hard labor, whose working hours (due to school and jobs) is more like 6 p.m.-2 a.m. On our team, no one is allowed in the lab area without the advisor or one of the two barely existent University faculty members present, and the high school students aren't ever allowed in the machine room (we're at a University concerned about liability), so the advisor has no choice but to remain in the lab whenever the college students can do their work. He has other obligations too, including working out travel arrangements and other bureaucratic things (which are plentiful, especially for a university-sponsored team), and he's got his PhD work.

I would advise you to keep that in mind when you're feeling frustrated about the lab hours. Since you're working on the website, isn't it possible for you to work on this while the lab is not open?

About the lack of work for HS students to do in the lab--as the college mentor in charge of Electrical Layout, let me just tell you: it's stressful enough to oversee an entire portion of the robot, but it adds a bit more stress when I need to try to equip an army of high school students with something to do for the few hours he or she is in the lab. I try my best to delegate some of the wiring and crimping and labeling to high school students, but I will admit: I'm as anal retentive as they come, and there are some things I don't want to delegate to another person. I'm also more likely to give work to a high school student who calmly asks me if he can help me in some way than one who comes up and pokes me repeatedly and demands that I give him something to do.

I don't know if this helps to see other points of view or just makes you more frustrated, but I hope you can at least somewhat understand the reasoning behind the behavior of your advisor and mentors.