Anybody else burned out?

[Matt Leese]

I suppose I can be the first one to answer with an affirmative. I've been burning out every spring since around 2001. This just was my sixth year in FIRST on four different teams. I did three years as a high school student and three years as a mentor.

Hands down, being a mentor is much more stressful than being a high school student. Why? The mentors tend to carry much more responsibility than the high school students (I'm sure I'm going to get several dozen replies from high school students saying they carried a lot of responsibility and I'm sure they do; this is from my meandering experience only). This added responsibility has driven me to burn out ever since I started as a mentor.

Now, it's important to notice that while I do get burned out, I'm always involved next season (and being involved usually means I'm helping to direct RIT's involvement in FIRST). How do i do this? I generally spend the spring completely ignoring FIRST. Most of the summer is spent in a similiar fashion. This gives me enough time to recover from the season in order to be in a position to participate next year. This obviously works for me as I'm still involved with FIRST and plan to be next year (for the past three seasons I think I've claimed that that would be the last season for me but it hasn't happened; I finally gave up on claiming that this past year).

So there are ways of working through burn out. The best is to simply not worry about it for a good part of the year. FIRST consumes enough of my life for part of the year that I really need a break from it for a significant part of the year.

Matt