Taking the plunge. . .

[Siri]

This is a good question, as right now we're fighting to stay "plunged" with nor permanate space in which to work. Our transition to plunge-ness was also split into 2 phases, though I split them into technical and student leadership rather than technical and non-technical.

We started in 2005 as a very small, back-of-the-classroom, only-during-build-season team with hand-selected students, mostly upperclassmen. Most of us tended to take a lot of leadership naturally, because the teacher only selected those that did. After a teachers' strike separated us from the school during the 2008 season, we stopped the hand-selection and upperclassmen preference. This was in part because we basically didn't recruit in the chaos and in part because we did absolutely terribly in 2008.

The survivors were determined to fix it in 2009, and we took our technical "plunge". This was mostly on the part of our lead engineering mentor with a few remaining student veterans. This small scale worked alright for a while, but as the team started to grow (without the historical vetting process), the student population got younger, less experienced and less assertive, and mentors started to play a bigger role. We recognized this, and in 2011 we took the organizational "plunge" to restructure and expand from a team designed for selected alpha upperclassmen to one that would be better at giving everyone opportunity and encouragement to grow. We're still plunging on that one (that's a good thing, right?) as our team continues to get younger with less technical background.