The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'

[BrendanB]

Originally Posted by Taylor

Also, the 6-week aspect is a challenge I happen to very much enjoy. With the urgency created there, the team is able to truly learn prioritizing, scheduling, making tough decisions quickly but intelligently - all the real lessons learned in an abbreviated build schedule.

And I'm sure FIRST views it similarly. 6 weeks is part of the challenge! I know in reality most of us build practice robots and utilize the 30 lbs withholding to the max amount possible (our team especially this season) but there won't be a perfect scenario that works for everyone.

If build season is extended I know for most of us the following will shake out. The first 2-3 weeks we will probably meeting 3-4 days a week increasing to 4-5 during week 4. Then weeks 5-6 will be back to the crazy end of build schedule we all do (if I mentioned some of our team's schedule during these weeks I doubt most people would believe the time we put in the final weeks. I don't know how we stayed alive). Now the robot is done and its off to week 1 events. Robot comes back good but never good enough (if you are lucky) but for most of us the robot isn't what we want. Now commence another 2-3 weeks of craziness to prepare for the next event.

While this topic has remained mostly on mentors the students need to be address too in this thread. Extending the build season has implications on their lives as well. For us, right after our Week 1 is when spring sports begin tryouts of which we saw a large drop in attendance along with other activities and work starting in the spring. For our team I don't see our team really functioning past our first regional aside from the driveteam and a few programmers meeting to debug the robot. Most of us just can't give that much extended time up. For us that stems from the fact that we are a school based team. Meetings begin at 2pm when school gets out and finishes around 5:30pm. This is the standard meeting time mainly used outside of build season. Typically during build season we meeting Mon Tues Fri 2-8, Wed Thurs 2-5:30, and Sat 9-6. Occasionally we meet Sundays during the crunch time weeks 11-4. These were not the hours our team met during the last two weeks of build season. Those hours would have allowed us to keep most of our sanity!

If the build season were to be extended I know my involvement would drop as the season drew longer. Yes the main build season would be more manageable with school and work (this past season I worked two jobs 6 days a week), however in order to make meetings I and other adult mentors/engineers on our team have to work out special schedules to make our teams 2pm meeting. I have an easier time working this out than others who work until 6pm which is why most of our meeting go until 8pm so we can have more adults involved teaching and working with students. We also can't start meeting later and do what most teams do: 6-9:30/10 because that would instantly burn out our head coach who teaches at the school and needs to be present in order for our team to meet.

For me the burnout comes in weeks 5 and 6 when we realize exactly where we are and how ineffective we were in weeks 2-3. Do I wish we had more time? Somewhat. But more importantly I regret how we operated and continue tweaking the machine for next season.