Keeping in Touch & Remaining "Relevant"

[VexisDarksteele]

Hello, CD.

This is a thread for those of you who may have experience with long-distance mentoring, or who may have fallen out of the FIRST community for a while only to try and "catch up" when you decided to come back.

As a dedicated founder and alumni of our team, I really want to continue to help out the current and future students... The problem? I'm 5.5 hours away. The only times I get to physically visit the team are during my university's breaks, and on rare occasion, at competitions. And on those visits, I don't feel like I'm much of a help; I'm more of a guest celebrity appearance for the students who still recognize me than a mentor. We've discussed things like video chat as a potential workaround that would enable me to be there throughout the season, though that has yet to be enacted. All that leaves me with is email and Google applications like Drive, where I can edit and comment the Chairman's documents in real time with them. Other than that, I don't have much opportunity for interaction.

Additionally, I sometimes feel as though I have nothing left to contribute for them -- seeing how prepared, how on top of things these students are, it seems like they're already far better at Chairman's and marketing than I ever was. I couldn't possibly be more proud of how the team has done these past few years, and the level of student talent blows my mind. But it also creates this need for me to remain relevant if I wish to mentor, this need to find something that I can still give helpful input on, and I'm having a really hard time with that. Perhaps this is how old computers feel once they've been replaced with a newer model, eh?

It's for these very reasons that I decided not to renew my mentor status on TIMS this season; it just doesn't feel right wearing that title when I barely do anything to earn it. My fear, though, is that once I am graduated and able to mentor full-time, I'll have been out of the FRC community for long enough that I'll no longer be current on how everything works anymore. Updates are constantly being made to rules and award submission procedures. I think it will be difficult to get re-acquainted with it all, which is precisely why I'm trying (unsuccessfully) to remain submerged all along. It's just hard when you have 3/4 of a state separating you from your team.

So, question time:

If you've ever mentored long-distance, how did you remain in contact with your team? How successful were you?

If you were uninvolved with FIRST for an extended period of time and eventually came back, how difficult was it to get back into the swing of things? How did you remain current on all the changes made?

Have you ever felt that you have nothing else you can possibly teach/guide the team? How did you deal with it? How did you keep your fields of expertise relevant?