[mechanicalbrain]

Hmm something I'm currently dealing with. We are semi student ran and I'm trying to make our team more student controlled. I found that while mentors may be skilled with engineering and create great designs they tend to not be practical and often mentors don't actually have experience in robotics just what in theory should work. In fact mentors can easily cause more trouble then solving problems. One thing i see is mentors coming up with ideas and trying to imprint them on students. What ends up happening is that the robot really has little work by the students and it shows (and thats not necessarily a good thing). Even though I'm not a mentor i still have to fight the urge to force my ideas on others and am often better off for it. Ive also found that the reason certain teams do well is because the same mentor is designing the robot each year. One thing students need to learn is how to pass on knowledge to other students so when they leave the kids still their know what the heck their doing. I do this by making other students do the work (this may sound kind of lazy but has a specific purpose) even though i would prefer to do it myself. This is great because if I'm gone for a reason or want to do multiple projects at once i don't have to worry about anyones competence. How many of you can tell some kids set up a test robot and all the wiring and we need the system done by the end of the day? Ill tell you its pretty cool to watch them go off and know they know exactly what their doing. Anyhew ill bet if ran right a student run team can outperform almost any mentor ran team (but not those with insane resources!).