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Re: GP? I think not.
Dan,
The mentor vs student debate has long raged since what I can remember in FIRST. So has the big team vs little team. I was on a team in high school that I felt was "too" mentor run at the time, so I stepped up, I asked the mentors if I could take a leadership role as a sophomore, I forced my way into every design, build and program that I could, and I tried to make sure that the other students on my team had the same experience. On my college team, we started out high school and college mentor peers for the first two years. After that, the college started to bring in a mechanical team that while drastically improving the design of the robot, didnt seem to involve the high school students as much. I fought tooth and nail but lost that battle (but am happy to see that they were able to spin it around a few years later).
Now I've had the amazing experience of being able to form my own team and run it however I wanted with some amazing sponsor support. We, like many others here, have tried to strike that amazing tight-rope walk of a mentor student balance. With an amazing sponsor, we are one of the well-off teams, but probably not really one of the power-house teams *yet*. Looking at some of the comments here, I realize we are probably one of the teams that some smaller teams might seem jealous of at times. We take 60+ people to every competition, go to 3 competitions a year, have crazy PC pit displays, etc etc. But we are in that weird in between. We did terrible at the FLR competition last year, but then vaulted into 5th at Boston and 8th in Championships. This year we were 27th at FLR, but 3rd in Philly. Its all been about learning for us. This year we wanted to learn strategy before the build. I wrote to mentors like Andy Baker, Paul C, Karthik, and several others to ask them how they did it, year after year, how did they build good robots for the strategy. ALL of them answered me with quite awe inspiring details.
I know the "if you cant beat them, join them" or "learn from them" attitude can feel frustrating when you are at the bottom... I remember my high school team, no matter how much sponsor/mentor support couldnt ever live up to the cross town rival team that we always seemed to be up against. Heck in my first two teams, and 7 years of FIRST, my teams NEVER received a SINGLE trophy. It was disheartening sometimes to sit at the competition and think the awards were going to be for us, but they werent. But we always jumped back in and tried harder. At the time teams were much further spread out, ChiefDelphi didnt really exist to the extent that it did, and it was much easier to be jealous of the teams than learn from them.
I dunno, in my eyes, FIRST is what you make of it. We are all going to have those pangs of jealousy here and there. But we cant let this be like sports, we cant say "oh that team gets the fancy uniforms, shiny busses and expensive meals so they do better". We ARE NOT SPORTS, lets not let that rivalry or jealousy stay in our hearts. Everyone is going to feel it time to time, I know I get that feeling at some point during every year, but I often just force myself to turn around and see how our team can do better. Its not worth trying to BE them, its not worth being JEALOUS of them, we are who we are, BUT we can be who WE want to be.
While it may be unfortunate to see mentors fixing a robot with students standing back, and I know how it feels to see that, Im not sure its always as bad as we think it is. I struggle with it a lot. If I had the choice between a two mentors and a student fixing something and being done in time for our next match to let our student drive team get out there and give it all they have for all the hard work our students have put in all year, or letting 3 students struggle with it and miss making it out for the match... I can honestly say I would probably pick the mentors. I know that our students designed EVERY part on that robot, and that in reality our pitcrew is really 6 students and 2-3 adults, but if it came down to it in the heat of battle, and you KNOW someone can fix something in time and the students cant, what would you do? The answer of course is always training the students well enough ahead of time, and that is what we always try to do (and Im thankful I havent ended up in the situation I expressed here), but the reality is that student interest varies from year to year. If there arent any students interested in mechanical, should I let the electrical students fail because it should be all student done?
Really every team's situation is different, and I see your frustrations, Ive been there many times, but I think its what we do with those frustrations that determines our success or failure in FIRST.
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