Mentors: What's something you wish you knew going in?

[PayneTrain]

When you mentor, focus your involvement in FIRST primarily (solely?) on the team. The kids, their parents, the kids, mentors, the sponsors, the kids and the kids are the priority. Working with multiple teams should take a back seat. Developing your own portfolio should take a backseat. Building a social circle in FIRST should definitely take a back seat, and volunteering in FIRST might even need to take a backseat. It is a marriage in FIRST where you and your team are the same entity. Anything you do that is not in the best interests of your students is a waste of everyone's time and effort.

Your primary job is not to build the most technically advanced robot, but build the best possible team. The higher up the rung you get in the mentoring pool on your team, and the bigger your team gets, the greater the focus you must put on leadership skills. To be an effective leader that can build and sustain an effective program, you will have to compromise and sacrifice without gratitude and even when facing great turbulence and headwinds.

Never settle into routine. Always be willing to change your program to make it better and always be willing to ask for and accept help, for your own sanity.

I don't say this solely because acting the opposite of what I described above is bad or unsustainable, but the reward of mentoring comes when you put the students on the team first and watch them fly.