Getting Mentors out of Comfort zone

[nuclearnerd]

Originally Posted by M3NT0R

I'm going to hijack the thread a little bit.
any tips for cold recruiting mentors. I don't have good connections with local companies or industries.

I'm sympathetic to your quest. We did pretty well this year recruiting mentors for our rookie team so I'll offer what worked for us:

• Borrow from an existing FRC team (thank you 4039)
• Check your local college for FRC alumns - there may even be an FRC club, or your local FIRST org can help locate alumns. Students have the most time and energy to spare
• Ask all of the shop / science / tech teachers in your school or neighbouring schools / colleges. Some of them may already be involved in student competitions, and may be willing to switch / merge
• Put a letter out to your state Professional Engineers association - Retirees are the best if you can find some
• If there's a "hacker space" in your community, visit and ask around. Maybe prepare a "pitch" ahead of time, or invite people to coffee and youtube.
• As Megan mentioned - parents! Kids who are interested in robotics often have parents who are interested in robotics. Even if they don't have the technical background, they are usually motivated to help their kids team succeed. In both teams I've mentored, we've had really active "Parent Groups" who took care of things like build season food, hotel reservations, carpooling etc. They were a huge help!

The harder part of your question is getting mentors to come often. FRC Build season is a frankly unreasonable amount of time to commit, especially if your mentors have full time jobs and/or families. The best solution, if you can't find anyone else crazy enough to lead, is to recruit as many "part timers" as you can. Try to get everyone to commit to some minimum amount of attendance / responsibility during the off season, and then plan your meetings / team ambitions to suit.

Good luck!