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Unread 27-01-2016, 22:53
Collin Stiers's Avatar
Collin Stiers Collin Stiers is offline
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Re: What to do when mentors are leading the team in the wrong direction?

I think your best bet is to try to have a rational conversation. These mentors may not see your view, but maybe they can, or maybe they can convince you that their current path is best. I find that most problems like this can't be solved with a good honest debate.

There is nothing wrong with mentors trying to prototype their ideas. The problem in your case seems to be that the mentors are pulling students off of (at least in your view) more important jobs. so maybe the best thing to is to have those students return to their job, but have the mentors keep pursuing their own ideas.

My team is almost 100% student lead, to the dismay I think of some of our mentor, but they have discovered a way around that. Every year our mentors have their own ideas, they let us pursue ours, but they also work on theirs a little bit. One of our mentors does this quite substantialy often building a mostly functional robot with his prototypes, however he never interferes with us, only taking students to help him when they don't have other jobs. And that process has been incredibly helpful. I cannot say how many times he has saved us. Often in the middle of the season we will find we have reached an impass, or we are working a dead end. and this mentor will come to us and say. "look guys I think you have a problem here" or " I think the decicion you guys made earlier has lead to a dead end, but in my own work I think I have just the solution for you"

I this way the mentors get to lead the team, not by force, but by merit, because at some point or another, us students are usualy force to admit that their idea/plan is better or smarter than ours, that is why they are mentors after all.
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