Team applications: Yes, or no?

[loyal]

The community service requirement is brilliant! I am going to talk to my son/ team vice president to see if that can be added to our requirements. My son and I volunteer every Saturday that we can for Habitat for Humanity. A community service requirement would prove a commitment to the team and a prove the individual is motivated.

[DonRotolo]

Of course we collect necessary info from each student, and advise them of certain requirements, but there are no rejections. Unless there's no form submitted

What we do is set forth a service requirement (ours is 10 hours): Show up at the team carwash in September, show up at our fundraising events, show up at shop cleanup, etc. No exceptions to the 10 hour rule, failure here is that you're not welcome on the team. For those laggards who are eternally late, we do offer some make-up sessions doing the 'dirtiest' work, like carrying supplies, wiping down machinery and tools, taking out trash...

Then we have performance reviews - one at the end of week 2 and one at the end of week 5. Students are rated on productivity, seriousness of purpose, and effort (to name a few). The week 2 is to put the slackers on notice, and the one in week 5 determines if they travel with the team or not. The standards can be as low or high as your team leadership likes, but there MUST be a rubric (score sheet) so all students know exactly what is expected of them.

Just like a real job.

(This system contributed to our winning 3 Entrepreneurship awards so far this year)

[Cal578]

Originally Posted by DonRotolo

Then we have performance reviews - one at the end of week 2 and one at the end of week 5. Students are rated on productivity, seriousness of purpose, and effort (to name a few). The week 2 is to put the slackers on notice, and the one in week 5 determines if they travel with the team or not. The standards can be as low or high as your team leadership likes, but there MUST be a rubric (score sheet) so all students know exactly what is expected of them.

The different purposes of the week 2 and week 5 reviews is a great idea. I would like to learn more about the standards you set, how you measure performance against the standards, who implements it, how you enforce it. Also, how do students react when they don't meet the standards at week 5, and how do their parents react?

If this is too much detail to post here, feel free to email me.

I'm asking all these questions because I think our team could improve in this area. The other posts in this thread have also been helpful. Thanks, everyone!

[Carolyn_Grace]

As a student on the Killer Bees I had to fill out an application, collect two recommendations (one from a teacher at our school) and be interviewed by two mentors on the team. It was a great experience. I learned more about the program before I became involved, the mentors were able to get an idea of my personality and what I might be interested in doing on the team, and I was able to ask questions before making a final commitment.

It was also the first application and interview process that I went though, which turned out to be a very useful experience for later in life (well, later that year actually...) when I applied for jobs.

On the mentor side of things, interviews have always been one of my favorite aspects of this program. The applications and interviews are an awesome way to get to know potential students, but we even interview our returning students, and that is sometimes the most rewarding. We ask them questions like the following:

• What was your favorite part of the build season (and/or competition season)?
• What was your favorite event and why?
• What was your least favorite event and why?
• What did you accomplish this year?
• What do you want to accomplish next year?
• What can we do better as a team?
• What can the mentors do better to improve the team?
• How can you take a leadership role next year?
• etc....

It's a great way to get feedback and assess what we need to do differently (or the same!) for the next year.

My impression is that 33 students generally enjoy the interviews and see the benefits of filling out an application. At least I haven't heard any complaints about it so far.

(side note: the two mentors that interviewed me as a student are now two of my favorite people in FIRST. I still remember that interview: me dressed in my softball uniform and meeting these two people who ended up making such a huge impact on my life...pretty awesome. )

Thanks all for posting your thoughts. While there seems to be no unanimous answer, it looks like an information sheet of some kind is very useful. I look forward to the new responses. Thanks!

[Caleb Sykes]

My team only has 15 members or so, and I would love to have an application process, but right now we cannot really afford to lose any potentially helpful members of the team. Over the summer and into the fall, we are going into an aggressive recruitment phase to expand our team size. My question is, should we enact an application/interview for this upcoming year even with this uncertainty about size?

[nlknauss]

Originally Posted by inkling25

My team only has 15 members or so, and I would love to have an application process, but right now we cannot really afford to lose any potentially helpful members of the team. Over the summer and into the fall, we are going into an aggressive recruitment phase to expand our team size. My question is, should we enact an application/interview for this upcoming year even with this uncertainty about size?

Remember that an application doesn't have to be used to filter out potential members. You can use the application to learn so much about the interested students and what they hope to accomplish as a member of your team. I think that Carolyn's post above on Team 33's application does a great job of outlining a possible application you can use.

[sanddrag]

We have never had the problem of too few interested students. We have always had and application, recommendation, and interview process. This in process in itself weeds out A LOT of potential applicants which is a good thing. If you can't work your way through an application, most likely you will have too much difficulty in much more complicated things we do. This year we actually turned down a few students for various reasons. We have also expedited a few applications through the process due to personal recommendations from people such as myself. The application process has traditionally opened in October, but this year we're planning to do early application in May (end of previous school year) for next season's team. We also plan to have a trial period in which students are accepted for a probationary period to gauge their interests and we can see their performance and commitment before the season.

We do not have the number of adults to support a team of 50 students. We can get by with 32 but that's about tops. You don't want a situation where more students = less work getting done (which often happens).

One difficulty we need to solve is finding a way to make the application process more standardized and objective. We made an error rejecting a student this year. We later reversed our decision an welcomed him to our team, which was one of the best things we ever did in this particular case.

If you have to try out for football, why not have to try out for robotics? My question is what exactly should the tryout be, and does it justly prove or disprove that a person would be a good team member to have?

[Chris Fultz]

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/2379

That is a link to our 2010 business plan (2012 to be posted soon).

We have an application process. The application and information is in the business plan.

The "interviews" are conducted by the lead teacher, a few mentors, and our team captains.

We learn -

1. If the student is interested enough to fill out the form and sign up for an interview time, show up, and show some interest in what we do.

2. What the student knows about the team, the program and what we do.

3. That the student and their parent(s) understand the time and financial committment (fees and sponsorship requirements) to be a part of the team.

All students apply and have an interview. Returning students must also hae a resume. For returning students, the interview is also like a "performance review" where we talk about what they have learned, what they would like to learn, ideas for change, etc.

It is very rare that a student who goes through the interview process and wants to be on the team is not asked to be on the team.

We also have a 'pre-applications' open house so that perspective new members and their family can come to the lab, see the robots and the programs we do, talk to other students and mentors, and get a good feel for what "robotics" means.

[Allison K]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

We have never had the problem of too few interested students. We have always had and application, recommendation, and interview process. This in process in itself weeds out A LOT of potential applicants which is a good thing. If you can't work your way through an application, most likely you will have too much difficulty in much more complicated things we do. This year we actually turned down a few students for various reasons. We have also expedited a few applications through the process due to personal recommendations from people such as myself. The application process has traditionally opened in October, but this year we're planning to do early application in May (end of previous school year) for next season's team. We also plan to have a trial period in which students are accepted for a probationary period to gauge their interests and we can see their performance and commitment before the season.

We do not have the number of adults to support a team of 50 students. We can get by with 32 but that's about tops. You don't want a situation where more students = less work getting done (which often happens).

One difficulty we need to solve is finding a way to make the application process more standardized and objective. We made an error rejecting a student this year. We later reversed our decision an welcomed him to our team, which was one of the best things we ever did in this particular case.

If you have to try out for football, why not have to try out for robotics? My question is what exactly should the tryout be, and does it justly prove or disprove that a person would be a good team member to have?

Our team is in much the same situation. We are miles past the point of diminishing returns and being able to provide a quality experience for every member of the team. At our first few meetings this year we had 100+ interested students. We are looking at implementing an application/interview/probation process to make it possible to provide the experience that we want our students to have. I've been reading through old threads on the subject as well, and have thus far come up with this outline...

1) Every interested student must fill out an application every year. Acceptance in one year does not guarantee acceptance in future years.

2) The application process will include

• General Information so that we aren't running about in December trying to get completed emergency contact and student driver forms

• An Interest Survey which will use a 1 to 5 scale asking the applicant both their interest level and current skill level in each area of the team, to help us put together a balanced team

• A paragraph describing why the applicant would like to be a team member

• A personal recommendation (I don't think this will be required, but will certainly be a helpful addition)

• A statement signed by both the applicant and their parent to ensure that they understand the approximate time commitment expected of team members

3) All returning members will be subject to a performance review/interview in which they will have the opportunity to speak about what they accomplished as a member of the team and their plans for their future as a team member. (I'd like to say we'll have time to interview all of the new members as well, but that's stretching our resources a bit thin I think).

If any other teams are willing to post their application or questions in which they have used in the past I would love to have them as a reference in putting together the documents that we will use.

Our goal is not to exclude interested students, but we can't continue as we have been and still provide a quality experience. The plan is to also offer FTC so that everybody can still get a FIRST experience, but our FRC team is well past capacity.

Allison