Quote:
Originally Posted by thefro526
Last year we took 16 Students to Atlanta. 15 of them were Seniors, One of the was a Sophomore who's now our Captain and Driver.
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This happened to us 2 years ago. We had almost 20 active students for Overdrive. For Lunacy, we had 7 (mostly due to graduation). We lost a good number of mentors around the same time. All but 3 of us were seniors, though I've come back as a mentor. We have a very young team this year, but thankfully (miraculously) we're back up to around 20 students. There's been significant loss of build and oversight experience, both in administration and fabrication, though. Fortunately, we picked up quite a few new mentors as well, a couple of whom are old hats in FIRST.
Our new model has 3 components:
1)
Mentoring - focusing on students mentoring students, specifically seniors to underclassmen, but in reality anyone who can serve in that capacity for a given skill/task. Historically, we've haven't really guided the upperclassmen to this, though some of us tended towards it anyway. [This student-to-mentor transition sure makes first-person grammar really hard.]
2)
Recruiting - lots of it! Get in the schools (we hope specifically the CAD, tech ed, etc classes) talk to the teachers, get in the community, demo to sponsors (perspective mentors and their kids), just talk a lot.
3)
Retention - this hasn't really a big problem for us (other than the whole graduation thing), but it's always good to keep in mind. Robotics isn't for everyone, but if someone's drifting away it can be good to (nicely) ask why, just in case there's anything you can do. This question is usually better coming from a student (reduces chance of sounding accusatory). This can apply to mentors heading in a different direction as well. Even if they do come around less, it's good to keep in touch with them.