Teams losing lots of seniors

[Shu Song]

It seems like a lot of teams are losing a lot seniors this year. Is it an anamoly that a team loses around a third of its members because seniors graduate, or is that a norm?

We are losing 11 seniors out of 25 students, 1022 is lose a third of its members, I heard that 771 is losing the majority of its members(someone check me on that I may be wrong), and there are plenty more.

What other teams are losing a substantial amount of seniors this year?

[lsmith243]

I wouldn't say we're losing a TON of seniors, but our two student team leads, about 5 subteam leads, and 3 more extremely intelligent and helpful guys are all leaving this year, which is a huge dent to our knowledge basis. We're trying to get them to "leave behind" all their knowledge on the things they've brought to our team, but they're leaving at the end of next week.

[Greg McCoy]

Originally Posted by Shu Song

Is it an anamoly that a team loses around a third of its members because seniors graduate, or is that a norm?

It seems like on average you should lose a quarter of your members as seniors, unless you scare lots of them away as underclassmen

Team 45 is only losing 3 seniors this year out of about 25 students.

[Kyle Love]

Originally Posted by Greg McCoy

It seems like on average you should lose a quarter of your members as seniors, unless you scare lots of them away as underclassmen

Team 45 is only losing 3 seniors this year out of about 25 students.

45 isn't just losing 3 seniors. We are losing 3 great and very productive seniors. Look at it this way. Half of our drive team is going to be gone for next year and our head electrical guy will be at Kettering. They were all vital members this year. It will be sad not having Greg, Austin and Steven around the shop next year. But hopefully they can continue on and help a college FIRST team like 461 or 1646. Great job guys' you will really be missed!

[petek]

From what I've seen this seems to go in cycles - some years there will be a big influx of freshmen who stick with it and other years there are just a few. Cybersonics has nine terrific seniors graduating this year, and probably two juniors will be back next year. We could look at this as a problem or an opportunity. It would be a problem if our graduating seniors had not shown the underclassmen the ropes, but they did. Maybe it's an opportunity - for next year's sophomores and juniors to take on more responsibility, making the team stronger for several more years.

One thing for sure - it will be a different team next year - these are the kids I joined the team with and one of them is my daughter.

[Freddy Schurr]

we are losing 4 seniors,me being one, but i decided that next year i will return to mentor the team. i would say that we taught our underclassmen everything that we needed to teach them to move on and be better for next year.

[Shu Song]

I guess that I perceived this problem has more severe than it actually was. Because when I first saw it, we are losing ALL of our drive team, everyone who has ever touched the robot controls is leaving. We are losing the all the student leaders, all but one of the subgroup leaders.

But now that I think of it, I know for sure that 4 of us will be back next year as mentors, so it's not too bad. Plus the fact that all I've heard from other teams is like "we are losing the bulk of our team", you never hear a team say that they aren't losing anyone.

Thanks for your responses.

[StephLee]

Originally Posted by Shu Song

Plus the fact that all I've heard from other teams is like "we are losing the bulk of our team", you never hear a team say that they aren't losing anyone.

Originally Posted by StephLee

Our team had no seniors this year, so we aren't losing anyone. We were a rookie team, so the mentors tried to look for mostly underclassmen and juniors when they recruited people. They didn't want to lose anyone right after our first year. So we'll have 11 returning team members next year, and who knows how many recruits.

Now you have.

[Bcahn836]

Team 836 is losing about 13 seniors. However a few of us are coming back and dedicating time to mentor the team. One of our biggest problems is we are losing our 2 best programmers. But we have some awesome mentors and I hope that end of the robot will work out. As for the rest of the robot, the rookies and our junior members have that one under control.

[Steve Yasick]

Just about half of team will be graduating next week. The cool thing is of the 15 kids 10 are going on to study engineering in college, 3 are studying other things in college and two are going to work....in local industry.

It will be tuff to replace these great kids.

These are sad and exciting times.

Have a great "off-Season"

Steve Yasick

[KathieK]

"Knowledge management" is a key issue in industry where more people are moving from job to job now, and where layoffs are so prevelant. As employees leave, they take their knowledge base with them. Losing seniors/mentors can have devastating effects on a team if the team has no processes in place to capture that knowledge. The ideal would be to nurture freshman and sophomores, let juniors take the lead roles, and as seniors, share their knowledge with incoming freshmen and sophomores. As I am transtitioning off a team right now I am trying to sort through all my contacts, documents, etc. to pass them along to other mentors who will be remaining on the team.

[Joe Lambie]

I think I will echo the sentiment that it is so hard to lose your leaders, but fantastic when someone new and unexpected steps up to fill the void. We are losing 5 high school seniors, and being a college team, at least 4 college seniors this year. That can make things harder yet when you are losing two sets of leaders, but we all knew that this was coming, and planned accordingly. We selected people to takeover responsibility, or people stepped forward to volunteer. That is on awesome aspect of FIRST, anyone and everyone can and usually has the opportunity to lead.

[Lisa Rodriguez]

173 is losing 7 (1 being me) seniors. We're losing the base driver, 2 coaches, back up arm driver, 2 heads of pit crew, team captain and basically leaders of the team. We've done our best to try an educate the underclassmen and warn them what they're in for (a little bit better than what our class went through 2 years ago ) They're awful quiet and it kinda of scares me sometimes, but some are already rising up to meet the challenge. Also, use your offseason events to your advantage. At offseason, our seniors step back and let the underclassmen do the work (minus one match, we still want to drive one match) It's letting them learn while we're still there to help if they have questions or need anything. We tried backing off a little bit at Championships, but it was really hard, mostly because we didn't want to. We're working on letting go, ok?

[Billfred]

I count 1293 losing...(counts) four seniors that I can remember.

We're going to miss 'em (one is our main artist-type person, the one behind the main logo and the Ockham's Raizor logo, another is a great builder, another is our webmaster and driver and generic leet haxor, and the last one was our arm operator this year), but I think we're going to keep on rolling.

[Scott Ritchie]

Cyberblue is losing 13 seniors and the incoming applications are not making up for the loss. I am feeling a little pressure.