Mentoring Question

[Andrew_L]

A FIRST Robotics team is diverse enough that everyone can bring something to the table, regardless of background. It is important to note, however, that FRC has a different approach to the technical aspects of the program than some of the more common engineering approaches in industry, and many new to the program like to apply the approaches they're familiar with to FRC without knowing that FRC doesn't follow the norm.

For example, as a student the team I was on had mentors from engineering industry and from other industry who didn't see how what applied to FRC wasn't the same as what applied in the real world. We were often encouraged to use steel parts over aluminum ones because of the thinking that weight wasn't as important, we followed the idea that completing a task quickly wasn't a priority, and we designed with the conservative intention of thousands of hours of continuous runtime instead of a typical FRC season's worth of wear and tear. This wasn't the mentors making bad decisions, just the product of them not understanding how the successful approach to FRC wasn't the same as the successful approaches in their industries.

tl;dr: Bring on new mentors from all walks of life, because they all have experiences that can be valuable to the team. Just make sure that they take the time to learn the ins and outs of the beast that is the FIRST Robotics Competition, and that they don't try pushing their approaches when they don't fully understand why they may not be the best methods at the time. New mentors need mentoring too.