Your Ideal Mentor

[Kevin Leonard]

Originally Posted by EricH

Let’s assume, for a minute, that your team is looking for a mentor. With even some of the best teams out there looking for mentors, I think that's a pretty reasonable assumption. Setting aside the specific area of the team that you want to be mentored for a minute...

--What qualities and/or characteristics are you looking for?
--How involved do you want the mentor to be: doing for you, doing with you, or watching you do the work, or somewhere in the middle?
--How would you deal with schedule limitations of both the team and the mentor?




Please note: This is about you and your team and your team’s method of operations. This is not about X powerhouse is doing it wrong--that's because they simply do it in a way that is not your way.

Most importantly, I want a committed mentor, one who is willing to put in as many hours as we do during the season. One who is enthusiastic about building robots and building competitive robots.
A mentor should be able to participate on all levels based on the experience level of each team member and the team as a whole. If the team is inexperienced, the mentor should be able to take over the process more, but if they are experienced, they should be able to oversee the process.

The biggest and most important thing I want from a mentor is time. Anytime the students want to work on the robot, that mentor should be there. Experience in engineering or the mentor's field is good to have, but I'd prefer a mentor with as few time constraints as possible.

On Team 20, in order to use our school's machine shop and technology classrooms, we need to have a staff member from the school present, so that becomes a 20-specific preference on a mentor- that they work at the school(and I'm sure many teams have the same or similar type of constraints on space).

All of this is my opinion, what would work best for me, but other people could use different types of mentors as well. When I was a freshman, I could have seriously used a mentor who knew what they were doing and pushed me to get more involved in our build process.

And in 2012 our team could have used a mentor who toned down our expectations of our robot (no we were NOT going to shoot from EVERYWHERE).

Next year, we're going to have a very experienced senior class, and therefore we need a more "hands-off" mentor who can help over see the process instead of closely guide it.
I think different teams and students need different types and styles of mentors.