Mentoring Bounce

[Jared Russell]

Many companies (my own included) have at various points encouraged young engineers to mentor FIRST teams as a way to hone leadership and problem solving skills. I think there is a lot of evidence (albeit anecdotal, unless someone has actually tracked statistics) to suggest that these relationships are tremendously beneficial to those companies.

Another obvious way that mentorship/sponsorship benefits a company is media exposure. When we won the Championship Chairman's Award, our sponsors' logos were seen on a variety of local and national television broadcasts and by the President of the United States in person. For a while, the Lockheed Martin home page had two pictures on it...the Joint Strike Fighter, and Miss Daisy. Even on a local scale, many FIRST teams find themselves in newspapers and on the local news, where the company gets positive exposure.