FAHA: Team leader who doesn't always lead...

[Ken Leung]

Are good mentors automatically good leaders? How about vice-versa? A lot of people on FIRST teams say adult mentors are the ones they have difficulties dealing with, because students are capable to accept changes and learn from others, whereas some adult mentors have often made up their mind on how to do things. You might say that students are better at admitting they are wrong, whereas an adult mentor have their reputation at stake.

The following FIRST-a-holic is dealing with a mentor on his/her team who show poor organizational skills and lacks simple courtesy when talking to the team members. The mentor's excuse is that he is busy, but is that really a valid excuse for blowing your students off when they need your help? Take a look at the letter:

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I'm having a bit of a problem with the leader of our team. He's a PhD student at the university where our team is hosted. My first and most basic problem is lab hours/schedule. He has put a 60-hour lab hour requirement on all team members to travel. This is easily achievable, but I've noticed that a lot of the time when I'm in the lab, there's nothing productive to do. It's (/me checks top of ChiefDelphi) 13 days until ship, and just last Saturday I was there for 5 or 6 hours, doing nothing most of the time. Either the college mentors working on a particular project aren't there, or they're doing all the work (or worse, being jerks and yelling at you when you want to help--acting in a very non-graciously professional way, to sum it up), or the lab isn't open.

Second, he's set out a clear schedule of when the lab will be open, but rarely manages to open it on time, or even within the hour after he said it would open. Often, he's not even there, and we depend on college students or other professors to keep it open, and they're usually busy. Ironically, he told us he was in the lab until the wee hours of the morning yesterday, which is not something us high school kids can do (we have homework, first of all, and the lab officially closes around 8 or 9).

Third, he doesn't handle basic organizational things, like coordinating two people working on a project, or even introducing them to each other. I've been working on our website, and he told me someone else was working on a design for it. That's great, but when I asked him if he could show me who they are (our team is composed of several high schools, so I had never met these people), he grumpily told me to "Go ask someone and figure it out." Then, this weekend, I found out that we had begun to duplicate each other's work. I had written a backend (just a simple template system with sections and pages in them that generates titles, navbars, etc...), copied a little content off the old site, and started on a layout, since nobody had contacted me about the layout. They had finished designing their layout, and had made a banner for the top of the site, and were going to do the scripting stuff themselves. Basically he set us up doing the same work and refused to put us in touch with each other. (The other two people said that we were indeed both there at the same time, and he just decided not to put us in touch with each other.)

I really don't know what to do here. I'm spending more and more wasted time at the lab, and I'm feeling frustrated that it's crunch time and our bad organization is making it impossible for me to contribute to the team. I understand that he's a busy person, but lacking the courtesy to tell people when you can't be somewhere when you said you could, and being so disorganized that you have two people doing the same work without knowing, is just beyond being busy or distracted.

I've been on this team for three years now, and I'd like to stay and possibly bring people from my new school, but it's turning into a nightmare right now, and I'm conflicted as to whether I want to stay or not.

Is this normal for a FIRST team? Am I just being selfish, or is something really wrong with how this is working?

Thanks for any advice you can give.

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FIRST-a-holic Anonymous mailbox is a place to share your concern and frustration about your FIRST experience anonymously. It is the perfect place if you just want someone to listen, or ask for advice when you don’t know what to do. Submit your letters today at the FIRST-a-holic anonymous mailbox forum: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/f...splay.php?f=124
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[Emily Pease]

Your team advisor is probably stretched very thin; he has to accomodate many different people, including high school students, whose ideal working hours are anywhere from 3-9, and college students, who do much of the hard labor, whose working hours (due to school and jobs) is more like 6 p.m.-2 a.m. On our team, no one is allowed in the lab area without the advisor or one of the two barely existent University faculty members present, and the high school students aren't ever allowed in the machine room (we're at a University concerned about liability), so the advisor has no choice but to remain in the lab whenever the college students can do their work. He has other obligations too, including working out travel arrangements and other bureaucratic things (which are plentiful, especially for a university-sponsored team), and he's got his PhD work.

I would advise you to keep that in mind when you're feeling frustrated about the lab hours. Since you're working on the website, isn't it possible for you to work on this while the lab is not open?

About the lack of work for HS students to do in the lab--as the college mentor in charge of Electrical Layout, let me just tell you: it's stressful enough to oversee an entire portion of the robot, but it adds a bit more stress when I need to try to equip an army of high school students with something to do for the few hours he or she is in the lab. I try my best to delegate some of the wiring and crimping and labeling to high school students, but I will admit: I'm as anal retentive as they come, and there are some things I don't want to delegate to another person. I'm also more likely to give work to a high school student who calmly asks me if he can help me in some way than one who comes up and pokes me repeatedly and demands that I give him something to do.

I don't know if this helps to see other points of view or just makes you more frustrated, but I hope you can at least somewhat understand the reasoning behind the behavior of your advisor and mentors.