[Matt Leese]

Now that I'm back from Europe....

A long time ago I always thought the hardest part of starting a team was getting funding. Now, I think the hardest part is getting mentors. It isn't particularly hard to get a company to donate money but getting an individual to donate time is much harder; particularly the time commitment we're looking at.

The other key component of finding mentors is finding the right mentors. Not everyone is cut out to mentor high school students. For a rookie team, it's also quite helpful to find experienced mentors (which, for a rookie team, can be quite difficult).

So the question is, how do we recruit mentors (particularly those who are experienced) to go work with rookie teams? Most mentors who are working with team will not likely move to a new team without some large incentive (such as their child is on that team).

The only group that I know of that would be unattached to one particular team as well as having experience in FIRST would be college students. What we tried to do in Rochester (to some extent) this past year was to distribute the RIT FIRST college students to the various rookie (primarily) teams in the Rochester area. In many ways it worked but we were still short staffed most of the time.

As opposed to starting new college sponsored teams, I would think that using college students as mentors for other teams may be the best way to go. It helps to take a lot of the burden off of the college students (no need to run a team) and it may provide a greater service to the FIRST community.

Matt