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Unread 28-07-2008, 22:03
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dlavery dlavery is offline
Curmudgeon
FRC #0116 (Epsilon Delta)
 
Join Date: Jun 2001
Rookie Year: 1996
Location: Herndon, VA
Posts: 3,176
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Re: What Do You Wish You Would Have Known Your Rookie Year?

Quote:
Originally Posted by AdamHeard View Post
Actually, Dave's advice is very good in this case.
Adam gets it. My previous comment was quite serious.

What would I tell a rookie? Learn to swim.

Figure out what you have to do to keep your head above water. When you hit the start of FRC build season, you will likely feel like you are drowning in new information, ideas, people to know, things to do, things to learn, and even team politics. Many forces will conspire to overwhelm you with a sea of demands on all your available time.

As a rookie, the very first thing that you have to do find out how to navigate through all this new stuff. Find someone that knows how to swim through it already. Follow them. Watch what they do. Figure out what works. Learn how they differentiate between what is important, and the meaningless drivel that is mixed in. Learn to swim with them. And don't be afraid to ask for help and advice; your team mates can be life-savers when the last week of build season hits, and the robot still has four weeks worth of work to be done and there are thirty pounds to carve off and you have been running on 90 minutes of sleep for the past four days and you feel like you are about to go down for the third time. Think of your experienced team mates as your swimming instructors, and your mentors as your life guards.

If you do, you will learn to survive and float through the tough times during the build season and the competitions (and there will be some). If you don't, it will be like trying to doggy-paddle in a heavy surf - you won't make much progress, and you will quickly tire of the whole adventure.

-dave



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Last edited by dlavery : 28-07-2008 at 22:06.
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