Mentor/Student Involvement Philosophies

[Rangel(kf7fdb)]

Originally Posted by Jon Stratis

I would think a student like this would have found a different path or position on the team... Why would they keep doing something they don't like for 4 years?. Someone who goes on to major in theatre arts may have spent their time in the team preparing the chairman's presentation (which is basically a short skit acted out by 2-3 people in front of judges), doing pit presentations to judges (similar in some respects to improv), or working on things like the Safety animation, chairman's video, or a season release video (directing, editing footage, writing scripts, etc). There is certainly room on an FRC team for someone who wants to go into theatre arts. This isn't all about the robot, the robot is just the vehicle you use to create the inspiration and environment to help the kids succeed.

Frankly, if I had a student that spent their entire fine with the team doing robot build activities and then decided she wanted to go into theatre, I would feel like I failed that student. It's not my job to turn every student into an engineer. Rather, it's my job to show them the options and nurture their interests so they can be successful in their career path. Honestly, there are very few career paths out there that can't have a start with a well organised FIRST team.

My experience as a student could be somewhat similar. I was a freshmen on the team and our only programmer a senior was graduating. By the end of my freshmen year I knew someone had to take over as the programmer but it didn't take long to realize that no one really wanted to do it because they had other interests. I decided to fill the role as the programmer and began to work on different projects learning to code and I hated it. It was so confusing to me but I knew that we needed it and that our robots both land and underwater would perform a far deal lower than if I didn't do it so I stuck with it. So I continued to do programming and hated it for about 2 years. However most of my hate was the result of not understanding it and not having a solid background of the basics. Once it started coming more naturally, I love programming now. I love all the things you can do with it and can't imagine not doing it. Had I just begun it my senior year, I probably would have hated it still and not went into a computer science major.