My team has close to no dedication

[Alaina]

hey all,

This year has been very difficult for me. I am the only student who has been on my team for more than one season. And even current seniors who were involved last year mainly helped at the end of the season, so they don't know a whole lot about building a robot.

I think I have about 6 new members who are the slightest bit enthusiastic about FIRST (they're all freshmen, so that kind of makes me optimistic for 2008, but that's not my point). I was the only upper-classman (out of 9) at my team's kickoff party. Then later some mentors showed up, and we strategized while the freshmen played video games.

It's not like I don't tell my team how the build season works. I send out at least 2 emails to the robotics list (yay for technology schools) every day. Whether we meet at lunch or after school most people don't show up. Yesterday we were supposed to have a brainstorming session yesterday and I was the only one there. It was extremely disappointing.

We currently don't have an engineering mentor. The engineer who owns our workspace is leaving on Monday to be in England for 3 weeks. I'm sure he'll let us access our workspace but it's going to be a struggle to get any good designs without an expert opinion. And it seems like my team just wants to sit around until he gets back!

What disappoints me the most is how my teachers don't want to spend any time outside of school to work on this. I thought they were here to help us?

A 3-day weekend is coming up and we'll only be meeting one of those days. I really wanted to have a running robot by the end of the weekend. But we can't do that because we don't have a) a workspace or b) adult supervision. On Monday we are going to use a kid's garage to work and that's it. Hopefully we'll get our workspace back by Wednesday.

How can I convince my team that I can't do this by myself? I want them to know what FIRST is and what build season is like, but it seems like none of them are interested enough. I hope you don't take this post the wrong way. What I've said here is definitely not a first thought. For anybody who has read all of this, I appreciate you 'listening' and hopefully you could give me some advice.

Have a good MLK weekend

-Alaina