Seniors

[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.