Advice about team environment and finding mentors

[Jon Stratis]

Yes, recruiting more full time mentors will help, but it's not a complete solution. To find those mentors, look to near by engineering companies. Talk with your local RD or Senior Mentor, they may be able to help. Ask nearby, successful teams to help you find new mentors - their mentors may know people that can step in, but haven't asked them yet because there was no need within their own team.

But recruiting mentors that will stick around for many years won't be a magical solution that fixes all the problems this year. What it sounds like your team needs is a "5-year plan". Sketch out where you want your team to be 5 years from now and what you want it to look like. Then work backwards to figure out how to get there. Don't make the goal too ambitious, make it achievable. Then focus on identifying what you need to do now to make it happen. Focus less on projects you want to do and more on the process you want set up for the team. This is something I try to challenge all of my captains to think about - getting the team on track to be someplace better long after they're gone.

For example, if you're really worried about training younger students, then figure out what that training should look like in the off-season. How do you go about it? How do you get them ready for the build season? How do you get them engaged and energized? Tackling the complicated, technically advanced projects that your older members want isn't the way to do it. You have to start smaller, get them doing stuff that is actually achievable at their level. This off-season, my team worked on rebuilding a robot that had some critical parts cannibalized from it. Nothing crazy, nothing that needed complicated design. Just putting some wheels back on, getting the electrical system functioning, reworking stuff that had broken. When that was done, we came up with a "game piece" and had them start prototyping some stuff to interact with it. Again, nothing too complicated - just a wheeled shooter and a conveyor belt. These projects were focused on items that could be achieved by rookies with guidance from older students. Mentors were definitely involved, but the goal is to get that older/younger bonding going so juniors/seniors are working on training their own replacements.