[Katie Reynolds]

Ben,

I'll say this to you, as I would to anyone else: airing your team's dirty laundry in a public forum is not going to help the situation at all. In fact, it might make it worse.

Speaking on behalf of all of the mentors - especially the team leaders:

Remember, though we do get college credit for our time with the team, the amount of time we volunteer relative to that class time is enormous. Hundreds of hours are spent trying to teach you and your teammates as much as we can. Also, many of us were high schoolers in FIRST once too, and understand your want to do more than is possible with the time we are given. Keep in mind the mentors are human too, and love being involved as much as you do. Be active, get involved, and when you start a project stick to it.

We all want to students to do as much as possible, but also realize we are limited in our resources. Houghton is a smaller town and while we have a few hardware stores, we have to order most of the parts we need. It takes a day or two for an order to be shipped, three or four days to get here and an extra day or two to go through university mail. The reason a lot of students (and mentors) are standing around "doing nothing" is because we are waiting on these parts and cannot go on until they come in.

Another limitation is our machining resources. Since it is against University rules for non-MTU (university trained) students to use the shops, and since we can't use the high school metal shop, we are limited to one or two mentors who can use a mill, lathe, chop saw, etc. So when our machinists are swamped with parts, we have to wait.

As far as the mentors "doing everything" and designing the whole robot, keep in mind we have a much larger pool experience to pull from as far as design is concerned. Though it may be possible for the whole team to get far in robot design, even the most seasoned members of the team did not get to the point of complete, overall design until they were in the program 3 or 4 years. And even then, they don't get everything right. We sit down as a team for the first few days as a build and decide what we want the robot to do, and get a general idea of how we want to do it. From there, mentors work with students (and usually, this is in the form of students watching mentors design - again, the experience thing) and come up with a "final" design that will probably be changed some along the way.

On this team - and in life, in general - patience is key, as well as bringing concerns as an adult to the leaders, and in doing so, being a leader yourself.