[JaneYoung]

The transition from high school to college is one that involves a lot of change and a lot of shifting in many areas, including thinking. In the first paragraph of the FAHA post, it says that for the college students to return to mentor the team, it would be a productive use of free time and also make them more desirable for potential transfer schools. By reading that, it appears that mentoring the team as a first year college student is good for the college student from that perspective. It doesn’t say anything about the benefits to the team.

Second paragraph – the graduates were very active and productive students during their time on the team. That holds some of the keys as to why this is a tough topic. High school students enter the team for set number of years, finite. During their stay on the team, they develop many skills, including leadership and organizational. If they are wise, they mentor incoming freshman and new members during that stay. It becomes a cycle of students and mentors mentoring. Other times, student leaders are productive and do the work, forgetting to mentor or train the newer members or perhaps, ignoring them altogether. In the meantime, the new students continue to enter the team and with each passing year, they become veterans moving through their time in high school and then graduating.

When a group of graduates want to return to the team as new college mentors, they are still very close to the high school students in age, in mutual experiences, in familiarity with the team set-up. A danger lies within that. The danger is that the high school students will not be able to grow and mature into their development as leaders, deferring to the new college members/old teammates who could easily dominate – not having given themselves the time to develop and mature outside the team during the college transition.

Team development and growth in maturity is a natural part of the process and those team members/alumni who understand that and help in the development are very wise. That is the spirit of FIRST, in my opinion. The team mentors are thinking about the team and they are also thinking about the freshman college students, aware of the opportunities available for both.

There are teams that are successfully developed and managed by college mentors. That is not the same thing as returning to the team you were on during high school for purposes such as becoming more desirable for transfer schools. It runs deeper than that. This is food for thought, nothing more.