Advice for Rookie You?

[Libby K]

Old thread, but good advice.

For me, I think the TL;DR is two things.

1. Shush up & listen. You don't know everything, and you really don't know anything. Everyone else around you has been doing this for at LEAST another year longer than you have. They have good advice. Listen up!

2. Don't 'hate on' a team that's better than you. Observe, ask questions, and try to get on that level. There's no reason for the negativity. (I was SUPER guilty of this as a young person).

[dradel]

Get a few parents on the team to help set up a calendar for all the available scholarships in relation to the year/s students can apply for them, and when the cut offs are.

Give those said parents mentor titles even though they aren't at all the meetings, and or at the shop every day during build.

With all the $$$ available to students it is imperative that there is a department to help organize it all.

[Munchskull]

1) You are going to loose way more than you are going to win and you need to find peace with that, but not complacency. Every time you loose you learn a thousand things you couldo have done better but when you when you learn one thing that goes right.

2) You have more friends than you know by just being in the FRC program. To paraphrase Kevin Ross from FIRST Washington
"of all the people in FRC I am going to like 97% of you, sure 3% of you I might not be able to stand but if I am looking to weed out that 3% then I am going to miss an entire ocean of great people." He said something along those lines at the OSU district back in 2014 and those words have followed me for for years.

[KosmicKhaos]

This is a quote from Doc Rivers after loosing that Simbotics tweeted out some time over a year ago.

"I told them I was a player for 13 years, and I had my heart broken for 13 straight years. I told them every night I prayed, every single night my only goal was to win a world championship.Every year I'd give my heart completely to the team, and every year it got completely broken. I told them it was worth it. I told them it's so worth it to buy in and give yourself to a team, and this is part of sports, only one winner. If we didn't win this round or the next, it wouldn't have mattered.But it's worth giving yourself to the team. It's worth getting your heart broken and taking all the criticism. It should excite you. It does to me. I told them that. I'm broken up right now, but in my mind, I'm already thinking about next year. You just have to get back on. That's going to be us, and that's what we're going to do."

tl;dr: Pour your heart into it and don't be afraid to loose; yhere's always next year.

[ThaddeusMaximus]

Rookie team lead student here.

That giant electronics box is a bad idea.

Bite off a little more. But not everything; keep that design simple.

No mecanums. No fancy drivetrains.

Do actual strategic analysis and weighted tables.

Worm gears, set screws, lead screws, and keyways are your enemies and need to be avoided or mitigated; their ways must be learned.

Don't do familiar things. This is a learning experience, and oftentimes the familiar thing is actually much harder than the right thing.
- Adopt CAD earlier
- Adopt encoders earlier, ditch pots
- Adopt pneumatics earlier

Go over your mentors when applicable. They have some wild**** half-baked ideas. You put in quite a few out-of-place hours, but should have been more serious about that.

Push for weight savings and do some self study on structural engineering.

You'll find this out, but you're an ME who loves code/wiring. You really should be focusing on the mechanical side of things; you have controls on more lock than you put in time for.

Indirectly related to FRC: start taking community college courses ASAP, the credit transfer is wonderful and you wouldn't have had to take Physics/Chem/Calc 3/DiffEq at college. It takes as much time as being homeschooled currently does- you'll have 50% of your time devoted to FRC still.