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#1
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How many students does it take to maintain a team?
About how many students could maintain a team? My team (648) has about 25 students on it and if we were to jump ahead to the 2006 season right now, my team would have only 6 students on it.
Last edited by Rez648 : 23-04-2004 at 13:00. |
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#2
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Re: How many students does it take to maintain a team?
Bryce-
There really is no set number of people to maintain a team. I've seen many teams with many different sizes, and Ive seen them succeed as well as fail. The trick isn't a magic number of students, it's having members that are dedicated to the project. Secondly, you have a whole year! When I came through SigmaK, I heard a story about in 1998 when our chapter was left with 3 active members. Seeing as though the average number of greeks in a chapter on our campus was 10 times that, there was the chance of being closed down. But those three perservered, and even though the growth was slow, we are now at the healthy count of 32 lovely ladies Being aware of the problem is the first step to fixing it. So, dont give up. If you want recruitment help, let me know....I've done quite a bit of presentations in my day ![]() |
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#3
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My team started off with 5 students last year. This year we had 10. To me at least, the number of students you have doesn't matter, it's how hard they work and how good of engineers and mechanics they are. When you have such a small amount of people everyone works on something, and I think they learn more as a result. The only downside is that it's hard to do the extra stuff like pins and giveaways with more limited resources, and you can kiss having good scouting reports from your team at competions goodbye. I personally like small teams, but I've never experienced a big one.
What have you done in the past for recruiting? |
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#4
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Re: How many students does it take to maintain a team?
If I remember correctly, at UTC there was a team of four girls and one or two adults. (I remember this because I thought "Wow, pit crew and drive team all-in-one!")
They won an award for something owing to their few numbers. |
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#5
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Re: How many students does it take to maintain a team?
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#6
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Re: How many students does it take to maintain a team?
Theres 35 students on MOE and it seems to work out fine
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#7
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Re: How many students does it take to maintain a team?
We have around 40 students on our team. Personally, I prefer around 25 on a team. It's hard to really get to know everyone when there are so many students..not to mention all the advisors we have too. With a team of 25, there is enough work to do to keep everyone busy, but not too busy. Once you start getting larger, you notice more and more students sitting around doing nothing. I'm curious - what do the larger teams do to prevent it from turning into a '20% of the people do 80%' of the work' environment. This is something that I noticed this year on our team.
Eric |
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#8
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Re: How many students does it take to maintain a team?
TJ usually has 100 students sign up and by the time they realize all the work involve it drops to about 40-50... We usually have 45 and things are a little easy when all the work is distributed like that...
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#9
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Re: How many students does it take to maintain a team?
Back in 2002, we had over 50 kids on the team. 2003 we had around 35. This year the max is 25. Next year is 15. Yes, 15. Frankly, we are loosing tons of people, and I think we can do well next year. I think a minimum of 10 people is needed to perform like a true team, but you can build and run a robot with only 5 IMHO.
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#10
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Re: How many students does it take to maintain a team?
Team 1272 from bloomington, Indiana only have 4-5 i believe. They made it to the Arcimedies final. Like Jessica, it's not the numbers, it the amount of dedication.
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#11
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Re: How many students does it take to maintain a team?
This is our 9th year of competition, we usually have between 30-35 sign up, and about 20 people actually stick it out the whole season.
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#12
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Re: How many students does it take to maintain a team?
This year we had 34 students, with the 20% of the people do 90-100% of the work. Its a real problem, we are currently trying to think of ways to make the team more difficult to get onto or a way to weed out the people who loaf off of those 20%. In my opinion you can have 5 really dedicated students run a team, no problem, but you'll probably want more, to share the workload, but it can be done.
btw if anyone has ways to try to keep out the loafers-pm them to me, my team is having a great deal of discussion on the way to do it, and any experience with this could help, thnx ![]() |
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#13
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Re: How many students does it take to maintain a team?
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#14
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Re: How many students does it take to maintain a team?
I know this sounds very un-FIRSTish, but I think last year (Houston championship) was a true test of dedication to FIRST. I remember in 2000, we had 30 people sign up for Nonnebots. Roughly half of them would talk about nothing more than the "cheap ride to Disney." By the time the build season came around, we had about 15-16 students left. For the past 2 years, since the change away from Disney for championships, I've never seen more than 15 or 16 turn up for the initial planning meetings, and we ended up with 14-15 students on the team for both years. In any case, we've done pretty well with around that number. Of course, not all students could be there at all times, but we ended up with a core group of 8-10 dedicated students who were at every meeting, and it works out fine.
The Friday Judges award at UTC went to team 1059, I believe they are a team of 3 students and 2 engineers. To rehash what many have already said- it's quality, not quanity that makes a team. I am curious though, how larger teams (35+ students) are managed. How's the leadership structure? Do you have sub-groups work on different projects? How do you decide who the operators/human players are with a group that large? |
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#15
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Re: How many students does it take to maintain a team?
we have about 20 show up occasionally, 8 building the bot. Of course that build team has 6 seniors
![]() There has 1 team next to us at Buckeye with 3 people: a kid, his dad, and his physics profesor. Any smaller than that and I think you just spend a lot of cash to try to make a bot by the next kick-off. ![]() |
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