Finding a Mentor

[MikeReilly]

As a teacher, I can tell you that most of them might be intimidated by the unknown, in both responsibilities and time commitment. That might be the case for engineers, etc. as well.

The top key is having a personal connection. If you're just looking for supervision, what we call "bot sitting", just ask teachers for one day per week, with specific hours. They will do that. One or two of them might just start to enjoy it. I am not an engineer, and 8 years ago they just asked if I could supervise them. Still going.

Regarding industry mentors, it also helps to scour who moms, dads, uncles, aunts of team members. Get creative. I even believe some support could come from a Google Hangout with other FRC teams, university teams. They might also be worried about a big time commitment, so just ask for one afternoon a week.

Finally, promote yourselves. We got an amazing engineer mentor based small articles we put in our school newsletter. He was concerned we were doing small-scale stuff like VEX, and he was very surprised to see the FRC robots.

Keep with it. And use the FIRST community, it's built around sharing. I can tell you that Team 4509 is ready to help!