Graduate -> Mentor

[cadandcookies]

I'll answer the OP in three distinct parts: for my current team, for my former team, and with regards to my personal opinion.

My current team (FRC 2667) actively encourages students who stay in the area to come back and help. There are two primary reasons I've observed for this: for one, one of the most active mentors is an alumni from our first year in 2008. He's one of the most active and enthusiastic mentors on the team, and certainly the one who has sacrificed the most of his time, energy and money to help the team-- through college, he would drive back on weekends from Milwaukee, where he was attending school, in order to help the team. He, naturally, encourages graduating seniors to come back and help like he did. The second reason is that our team lacks in organized/invested/present mentors-- many take "shifts" working with the team during the week, meaning we have a different set of mentors every night. I'm personally not a fan of this, but having more people in the mix keeps the load lighter for everyone.

My old team, 2220, doesn't really let alumni come back until they're well out of high school. Our first alumnus mentor graduated the team in spring 2010, and only just started mentoring the team "fully" this past year-- after phasing himself in in 2014. This is also partially a function of the school-- 2220's school tends to send more students further away for college, while 2667's students tend to matriculate in Minnesota.

Personally, I'm in a bit of an odd position with regards to this. I generally don't believe college students should mentor teams, which puts me in an odd position considering I just finished my first year of college mentoring both and FTC and an FRC team. How do I reconcile this? First, I asked myself why I wanted to mentor a team-- was it because I genuinely felt I could help them, or because I wanted to gain another year of being a student? Was I doing this because it was actually right, or was I convincing myself to do it for ulterior motives? The truth is, at the beginning of my freshman year I told myself that I wasn't going to mentor or work with any team-- I was going to get involved with GOFIRST, volunteer at tournaments, and generally adjust to college life. I didn't believe I was ready to mentor a team-- I was blessed to have incredible mentors on my high school team that set a bar higher than I felt I could achieve.

I managed to get two months into the school year before getting involved with a team.

I got pulled in the way I think plenty of mentors do-- I was asked to come in and talk to a new team (FTC 9205), which turned into coming back the next week to help with strategy, which turned into helping design, which turned into an entire season. Half way through FRC build season, I got pulled into FRC 2667, which is at the same school.

Frankly, I'm not sure I made the right choice mentoring my first year of college. It worked for me, and it worked for both of the teams I helped (both teams made it to their state tournaments), but I can think of so many ways it could have gone wrong. If I had a heavier schedule or more difficult classes, studying on the bus on the way to help my teams wouldn't have been possible. If tournaments didn't fall in the right places relatives to my quizzes and tests, it would have been impossible for me to make it to their regionals. I ended up in the right place, at the right time, with the right schedule, and if anything had been off, it wouldn't have worked.

The key for me was realizing that I could not be the mentor I wanted to be the first year I worked with a team. Heck, I hesitate to say that what I did could even be called mentoring-- I was trying to do a combination of help the team, help the students grow as individuals, and help myself grow by learning how to and how not to mentor. Over the course of the year, I realized that why I wanted to be a mentor had very little to do with winning, and only a bit to do with building a robot-- I found value in mentoring because I felt I was genuinely positively impacting the students on the team's lives, and looking back, I classify that as a valid reason for me to work with a team my freshman year of college. I may not be the theoretical best possible mentor for my team-- I'm too young, I live too far away, and I don't have the technical expertise for most aspects of the robot, but I filled a role that needed to be filled, and positively impacted the team, the students, the mentors, and myself in my own small way, while still managing to have a great time in college and keeping good grades.

Personally, I'm a fan of skipping a year if at all possible (and yes, if you have better self control than I do, it is possible). But if you're doing it for the right reasons, and the timing is right, and you're comfortable and confident enough in yourself to handle it, it can work. Be very, very careful, though. When you stare into the team, the team too stares back. Don't let a team consume your life in college.

I don't think there's a correct way of handling alumni mentoring-- it depends so much on the team's situation and that of the alum to generalize. I think most healthy, consistent teams can deal without having alumni coming back immediately, but for some teams that can be the only thing keeping them from folding.