Quote:
Originally Posted by StevenB
I am currently a college senior studying computer engineering, and I want to find ways to get more of my peers involved in FIRST. Last year, some of my fellow students were given class credit for helping a couple of local teams, but unfortunately they weren't able to do much useful work, because FIRST requires a fairly specific skill set that they don't have.
Most of my electrical and computer engineering friends could design and simulate some cool circuits, but they barely know how to solder. And if I ask them to wire up a quadrature encoder or crimp a ring terminal on a 12 AWG wire, they look at me like I'm speaking a foreign language.
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It sounds like we went to the same college. However, I've found this to be the case with non-college age (i.e. industry) hopeful mentors as well. I have more than a few times had someone come to a meeting saying they would like be involved as a mentor, help out for an hour or 2, maybe come to a few more meetings but then they just disappear. It's frustrating in a couple ways, 1) we take time out of our team meetings to educate the new mentors, 2) the students see them as being part of their team and they disappear and 3) (just as you said) they take up a lot of time in a meeting with little knowledge about the intrinsics of FIRST (as they haven't taken the time yet to go through the rules, look at other designs, that kind of thing). In essence, they are just like a new member of the team, which is completely fine, but the other students perceive them to have a leadership role so that can cause a lot of issues.
My "fix" is, when I have a mentor who seems to want to help out (they have come to a few meetings) I sit down and have a talk with them about FIRST. What it really means, what we give to the kids, their role, and more importantly, the long list of their responsibilities. I have a CD that I also give them (the link to it escapes me now) which gives them a compiled source of information, such as the rules, pictures, a series of presentations, pretty much just more information than they would really want. And I think the test is, if they go through that material and acknowledging those responsibilities they still come back, I am more than happy to stick with them. Most of the time they don't end up coming back, due to them not understanding the full context of FIRST. Which honestly I'm completly fine with. I'd rather have 3 mentors on my team that are dedicated to FIRST and what it stands for than 10 adults who come once a week to see "what we're up to".
Obviously, the mentors that I'm speaking about are ones actively involved with the Build Season. There are many roles of mentors that do not require this level of interactivity, this is only designed for the mentors where we expect a lot of time out of them over a short period of time. And again, this is just my approach, I have found it useful over the years but I'm sure some people will disagree to my approach. Something big that I've found over the years is that, the more dedicated your mentors are, the more dedicated the students are.