How to Get New Members to Stay?

[Oblarg]

One thing to come to terms with is that in FRC, student attrition rates will likely always be high. FRC is a massive commitment of time and effort, and many more students are inevitably willing to show up for a few meetings because it sounds interesting than to gut it out and really invest as much of themselves as is necessary to be a productive team member.

With this in mind, here are some things I've observed that are useful for maximizing student retention:

1. Pre-season activities must be fun and engaging. It is a rare student who is willing to sit through a bunch of extracurricular lectures for the promise of eventually doing something fun during build season. In fact, here's a curious thing: when I joined 449, I did not know until a month or so before build season started that there was an "actual competition." The pre-season that year consisted of the team hosting their own little internal vex competition, and there was no talk of build season until it was almost over. Strange as it may sound, this was a pretty good strategy - new students were immediately able to involve themselves in actual projects, to try their own ideas and see those ideas succeed or fail. This was far more valuable than any FRC-specific technical knowledge we could have gained during those same months.

2. Build an inviting team culture. There are few things that drive new students away faster than feeling excluded. You must put conscious effort into avoiding a culture that establishes in-groups. FRC has a massive barrier-to-entry for a prospective student as it is; the last thing you need is to augment those with social barriers.

3. Make sure new students know that it's alright not to know something. I've seen far too many freshman robotics students bumble away cluelessly at a task they've been given that they have no real idea how to complete, simply because they're too proud/embarrassed to ask for help. This is one of the hardest things to dispel, as a mentor, and one of the most important - most new students cannot succeed in this way, and a student who is not succeeding is not a student who is likely to stay.