College Students: How is your experience in FIRST?

[Matt Leese]

Originally Posted by Ken Leung

I think I should clarify where I am coming from when I ask that question.

Considering a mechanical engineering major college student. Do you think he/she is a better mentor than an mechanical engineer with industry experience, who've done many work on robotics or automobiles? How about a junior in college compare to a parent who is also on the school PTA board? Or comparing to an experienced teacher who've taught physics for many years?

Do you really think college students can be good mentors, when we just graduated high school ourselves, with nothing more than FIRST experiences in ourselves, and still waiting to see the world out there and decide what we want to do?

There are some pretty amazing college students who are still participating in FIRST. They are amazing because they are good at coaching their team, organizing off season events, or build good robots because of their FIRST experiences. But, do you think they make great mentors? That is the question I post to the rest of you.

Don't quickly assume my answer is no based on what I wrote in this post. I am just trying to get you thinking ;-).

I think my answer isn't going to change. It depends. It's not possible to make a blanket statement that all college students are good mentors or all college students are bad mentors. Some are going to be good, some are going to be bad. Some will be better than professional engineers, some will be worse. Some parents will be excellent mentors, some will be awful. Some teachers will be great and some will be bad. I think I've dealt with all of those categories in FIRST (not at the same time, mind you; I try to concentrate on the good ones however).

I think I can say one of our goals is to actually start moving the mentoring away from the mentors and down to some of the high school students. Personally, I've found that you can learn more from mentoring than you can from being mentored. I don't see why it's not unreasonable to expect that some of the veteran high school students will take over some of the mentoring jobs and probably do a better job than the adult mentors (because they don't have to deal with the politics or the responsibilities). I know this happened on my team this year and it's something I was very happy about.

Matt