Seniors

[Karibou]

It's tough. I didn't realize how much I missed it until I went to kickoff the year after I graduated, and realized "I'm not going to be competing in the game, I'm never going to build an 1189 robot again. Never going to tell another judge our team history, never going to sweep the pit clean, never going to have to scramble to change the battery on the way to a match ever again."

Since I don't have time in college to mentor, the way I coped with it was by volunteering - which is something that I started doing my senior year in high school. Still not building robots, but it's still exciting to watch the students have the same experiences that I did in high school. I've made a lot of great friends though volunteering, so when I'm at a competition I'm still going back to a family of sorts.

My younger brother is still on the team, so I still go back when I'm home to see how they're doing and help out if I can (I actually walked in to the shop last year during an unbag period and the first thing I said was "your bumpers are illegal"). I may not be able to help them directly any more, but I'll always be proud to wear those numbers. I still wear my bandanna on my wrist when at competitions, still wear my "gearrings", and still wear my gear necklace as a reminder of how much of an influence the team had on my life.

Originally Posted by PayneTrain

EDIT: I would also like to add that just because some students cycle out and cycle in, the best students recognize that the success and sustainability of the team is far more important than the sum of their contributions. My class did a lot of work that isn't going to pay dividends until a year or two from now, and this year's class did the same. The number we wore and the mission that drove us means so much more to us than the trophies we won (but finalists and Innovation in Control winners was pretty cool)

Amen to that. There are a lot of things that I can look back on and say "I contributed to that", even though the benefits didn't start coming through until this year. My class went through a pretty rough phase of the team, with robots that didn't quite work, constant mentor and teacher transitions for various reasons (4 teachers in 4 years), changing workspaces, and handling the largest influx of rookies/largest team we had ever had up until that point. And things are definitely looking up for the team now that everything is a lot more stable. I loved my time on the team despite the stress, but it's a great feeling knowing that others are now having even better experiences.

Among other more important things, I'm still overjoyed when I go back to the shop and see my handwriting on the labels of the battery cart...

[synth3tk]

Originally Posted by Karibou

the way I coped with it was by volunteering - which is something that I started doing my senior year in high school. Still not building robots, but it's still exciting to watch the students have the same experiences that I did in high school.

I forgot about this. Volunteering, while only a few days a year, can help ease the pain of not being a student or having time to mentor. You get to see amazing robots, talk to even more amazing students about how said robot was designed and works, and watch the competition (depending on your role). And it can be fun, too.

[Jorge Ayala]

I am still getting used to the idea of having to go to college. I cannot cope with the idea of stop building robots for LamBot, I am a founding member of team. LamBot has been my whole high school. I feel very proud of the job done so far but I feel guilty too. During my three years in FRC my team members and I have not been able to find some kind of quality standards for the area of engineering. Most of our mentors are new each year so the quality of our robots have not been the best so far. I feel bad because I am not going to be able to be with them when they have to face the challenge of teaching a new mentor what FIRST is. But no everything is guilt, I feel proud that there are other students willing to take the leadership of the mechanics team. I may be away for FIRST, I may not, I don't know yet but at least I know that I have made some contributions to my team. I was safety captain and pits captain on my two first seasons, and now the new girls in charge of safety know how to keep everyone safe, how to impress the judges and even some other teams. (I won the Star of the day in 2012 and the girl I trained to be safety captain won it this year). Also in LamBot scouting was terribly handled, scouting was seen as "send someone to tell everyone that our robot is cool" but this year I trained six juniors and freshmen to scout the event and make effective strategies for our qualification matches. (This year that didn't help us a lot, we are still trying to get the robot part straight.) I am the FIRST non-mentor coach of drivers of the team so I am planning to leave some kind of document to guide the next coach.

All in all, I think I have made a contribution to the team, but I still feel like I have not given everything I could give to my team. It is hard to think about not being able to build and FRC robot in the future, but I guess this is how this works. New students deserve to take my role in the team and they also deserve to live the experience I lived. The bright side of this is that next year the first Mexican FRC regional is going to take place, so I am pretty sure a lot of hands are going to be needed (By the way, we are going to be more than happy to have non-Mexican teams attending to our first regional, hope you speak Spanish.)

[Trez]

I'm just worried that that the team will still survive and I want to do all I can to help it grow. Our team is somewhat small.

[MamaSpoldi]

Obviously I am not a senior... but I have a confession to make. My first year as a mentor I am embarrassed to say that I was a little annoyed by alumni hanging around like they owned the place, "trying to take over", and "acting like it was their team". After 7 years and my 2 children going through their 4 years with the team I have realized just how wrong I was in that impression. It is still their team (the alumni that is)... but it is not just their team. This team is part of every student, mentor, sponsor, parent, alumni that has ever been part of it. That is part of what makes FIRST so special. I have since apologized to the alumni from my rookie year whom I judged so unfairly with my exclusionary attitude, explaining that I just didn't realize. In fact I have very much come to cherish the many, many contributions to our team that are made by our alumni.

So, I say yes graduating can be hard but it is not goodbye if you don't want it to be.

[MARS_James]

If I am being honest the transition was not as hard for me as it was the rest of the people on the thread mostly due to the circumstances of my team. At the end of my sophomore year (my third season) my team lost everything, build space, teacher sponsor, main sponsor, access to our awards were taken from us. With a small group of students older then my class, and only 2 younger we took on everything on the team even the things mentors were "meant" to do. We became the main contacts for the team for sponsors to contact, we set up meetings, outreaches, began the process of becoming a 4H, up until we found a sponsor at a new school to take us on.

With those things established under us we became the driving force behind driver selection, team leadership, and public presence. The only thing that we didn't have control over was robot design, since to the new mentors we were "just kids" we did not have the knowledge to design and build something that complex, those were also to the two years we fielded our least competitive bots, this was what lead me to actually becoming a mentor and actually switching which schools I would be attending for college since I loved my team and did not want anyone after me to have to deal with this form of "Inspiration"

My first year mentoring my duties didn't actually change much due to our team distribution of experience (1 4th year, 1 3rd year, 10 2nd years, 22 1st years), so I became drive team couch after spending 5 years behind the glass as a student, lead mentor of writing taking over a bunch of rookie students, head scout of a group of rookie scouters, and the team "robot inspector" basically it was my job to memorize the rules after the first day (which I did as a student) and explain if a design or strategy was illegal. So the switch over was not so drastic to me.

That being said I am glad with entering my third year of mentoring my duties have changed to allow more students to become junior mentors like I did. The drivers begin evaluation being judged by senior students, a student I mentored is now the head writer with another now being the mentor of the sub team, and my pick for being the student lead of scout is now in his last year, produced a strong team behind him and is going to go to Alabama to hopefully help start up a lot more FIRST teams and bring the state closer to it's neighbors( Alabama only has 11 teams while Georgia has 49, and Florida 77)

So to conclude my longest post ever on chiefdelphi I feel that I set out with a plan and understanding of mentoring before graduating and have set up other students to do the same. Was it weird not going out for alliance selections, going to the question box, presenting chairmans, or driving? Yes. Was it hard to give up those things knowing that other people would get the same feelings I did doing them? No.

[Trent B]

I was one of the original members of 2502 and graduated from it a few years ago. It was definitely strange to have so much free time in my spring semesters that I didn't know existed after 4 years of robotics.

I tend not to get too sentimental about things like graduating, but this may have been because I was at the U of MN my senior year anyway. Additionally, I spent much of my senior year trying to train the younger members, so that I would know when I left the team would be in capable hands. One of those younger members went on to win Dean's List at 10,000 Lakes Regional this year. I still am a source of contact for my team about various problems due to the time I spend on CD and the amount of knowledge I have read over the years.

This year, I actually began to help mentor Team Neutrino (3928) with numerous other alumni who attend Iowa State University. I feel as though my transition from student, to captain, to mentoring was one smooth and fluid transition, my involvement with FIRST and FRC never really ended or changed suddenly, but rather slowly changed from learning to teaching.