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Unread 17-03-2003, 20:57
DanL DanL is offline
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From my life, I know that one's expierience depends entirely on the people involved in that expierience. If one surrounds oneself with people who know how to have a good time, one has a good time. The past four summers, I've kept going back to a summer program (JHU's CTY, if anyone is familiar with it - you guys know what I mean) for one reason only: the people. It's the group that makes the atmosphere, and it's the group that defines your expierience.

The question is how does one have a good expierience when the group doesn't work?

What does a team do when two prominent members' personalities completely clash? How does one resolve the tension without having to resort to explusion? How does one 'fix' personalities in general? When certain people just can't get along, how can this be remedied? I've talked before about how if FIRST is expanded to "every high school in the nation," the bad are going to come in as well as the good. Call me idealistic, but isn't the point of FIRST to expand its message to both types; expulsion of the problematic isn't the solution.

I've talked about students, but how about mentors. What happens when one doesn't agree with the way mentors act? It's a lot easier to fix students' behavior than mentors' behavior. Mentors have the advantage of expierience, but students have the advantage of not yet having developed strong biases. What one mentor might think is for the benefit or success of the team, a student may think they are not given the right opportunity. How does one determine who is right in a particular situation?

I guess I am aiming at changing people's personalities. Convincing a person to act one way or another is easy; changing their personality - their thought-process - the way they think - that is the challenge. How does one go about changing a person? The problem I see is who's to say that you have the authority to make one person behave one way as opposed to another way.

Someone I deeply respect said about my team,
Quote:
"While there weren't as many students actively interested in completing our robot this season as I would have liked, each of those students who made a commitment to completing this machine is well versed in its design and function. They can not only repair it, but explain the concepts that drive its design."
The potential on 810 is there, just there are obstacles; lack of opportunity to get involved, personality clashes, social tensions, mentor conflicts, etc. How does one address these issues?

So where am I going? I'm asking for advice on how does one change. Change tensions, change hatred, change a person, change a team, change a nation, change the world - it doesn't matter, it's all the same answer. It's just not easy to describe a clear method to acheive that reform.
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