Robotics beyond High School

[artK]

Keep in mind that when you're going to college, there is a lot more than just learning your classes and building new robots. FSAE/Baja are great for those who enjoy mechanical design and spending time machining parts, but for programmers, strategists, even electrical (though to a lesser extent), have less to do.

Also, don't feel that you need to come back and start mentoring right into college. For each one of the FIRST alums who are posting talking about how they started mentoring (and some who I suspect will post), there are two (and almost certainly more) students who graduate, go off to college, and never come back to FIRST.

Spend the time to relearn the material in a classroom environment, learn the theory underlying what you are doing. I took an introductory class in CS last semester that went over all sorts of design patterns and other cool things, that I had learned from my mentors and applied in the robot code, but didn't get the full depth of, because the application of these techniques didn't require certain elements of it. If you really want to mentor the students well, first you have to understand it yourself.

In addition to the studying/designing/mentoring that you may do, join other random clubs, see what sticks, you might be surprised. In my first week on campus, I walked up to a table recruiting for a Go club, an ancient Chinese board game. The thing about Go is, like FRC games, there are a (very large) number of different ways to approach situations, some more complex than others, and the strategist in me found it really cool, and now I play recreationally at least twice a week. I could talk all day about the game, but that would be way too off topic, but what's important is that you do something productive. If you're bored in college, you're doing it wrong.

Forgive me if this is a little rambling, I didn't have a whole lot of time to edit this down, and I have class in like 20 minutes.

[JamesCH95]

Originally Posted by artK

Keep in mind that when you're going to college, there is a lot more than just learning your classes and building new robots. FSAE/Baja are great for those who enjoy mechanical design and spending time machining parts, but for a programmers, strategists, even electrical (though to a lesser extent), have less to do.
*snip*

While it is probably true that programmers, strategists, and electrical-minded people have less to do in FSAE and Baja than the mechanical team members, there is still plenty of work to do!

Some teams build and program their own ECUs, traction control systems, dashboards, DAQ systems, etc. Programming work can be quite significant. Heck, even my small FSAE team made a custom power distribution board and CANbus dashboard.

Strategy is similar, there is a challenge and one must weigh different aspects of the challenge in order to determine which is most valuable within the scope of what one's team can accomplish. In FSAE there are scores for design, fuel economy, and cost in addition to all of the dynamic events. Balancing performance across all aspects of the competition is very important.