How to Get New Members to Stay?

[Jon Stratis]

Chris is Me has it right - people are less likely to leave if they get heavily involved doing something they like. And with robotics, that means strong mentorship that constantly pulls people up.

This past year, my team changed its lettering requirements to include a "lettering project" - basically, something that benefits the team that the student can take ownership of. For example, one student was responsible for the CAW - she spent 5 minutes on it every meeting, and it built out alongside the robot, instead of our usual last minute scramble. She was a freshman, learning as she went (a mentor had to help her understand what everything was, where we purchase stuff from, etc), and it was a great learning tool for her. Another student, a senior this time, wrote an entire scouting system, utilizing the FRC Event API to get data on each match from the FMS. More technical, more nuanced than making the CAW... But that's what the projects let us do - each student can shape their project to their interests and skills, and the difficulty and complexity of the projects grows along with the student. It gives them a lot of buy-in to the team, as they can poi t to it and say "i did that!". And after a few years, the projects will hopefully start to provide the students with a small portfolio they can use for things like college applications/interviews or when applying for internships.. Students pick their own projects, either from a list of things we know we need, or by coming up with something themselves. They have an "assigned mentor" to work with on that project so they always know who to go to for help. We had something like 2/3 of the team complete projects.