FAHA: Mentor + Team problems

[Bharat Nain]

Sometimes, you work extremely hard and you feel like your team has not treated you right. This First-a-holic is having a hard time with his/her team's mentor as they put him/her down at numerous occasions. How can you help make him/her feel better and deal with the situation?

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So I'm a two year veteran and a senior this year. For the past two years we have had a relatively small core team. For one of our sub groups I was a leader. I was in charge and looked up to by most of the mentors and engineers at anything related to my field.

At one of our recent meetings, our team mentor looked me in the eye as if he was disappointed with me. Later on another date I walked in late due to an extra curricular activity. Although I was ten minutes late he made a semi-big deal out of it. Then another student came in a few minutes later and he joked about him. After that he told me move but spoke nothing to any of the other veterans who were goofing around and emphasized how much that they were leaders. This really hurt me especially after everything I have done for my team, for once I wanted to rip my name from the team and disassociate myself with the name, logo, and number. Than after a while he talked about leadership on teams. There are only a few main veterans including me on this years team. Knowing that I have been a leader for my group and have worked more for my team than any of the others, he looked at me and called me out as "not a leader." Last year I spent a deal of time being the "go-to" guy and learning everything so that when the team had a question I had an answer. At that I worked so hard for the team I ended up failing some of my classes (careless of me) and ended up spending nights researching and talking to engineers about problems and how to solve them. I also took the initiative to sign up for the FIRST Blast because I knew our team leader last year was not very "into it" and did not share information with the team except his friends. Even more than that I have tried to change my teams reputation by talking to people and being friendly.

I am not a popular kid but I do my best to try and help out and behind the scenes I have done more work on paper and more work by pure effort and dedication that the others combined. After his speech and his looks of disgust towards me I no longer feel like I want to be apart of my district's robotics team. I have always been an outcast-ish person but I have overcome that on many occasions, specifically through robotics, to be more people friendly and more helpful but people don't give me a chance.

These combinations of veteran students on the team not supporting me but rather putting me down as well as this mentor making me feel lower than a piece of dirt makes me feel as if I don't want to be apart of robotics and the team I am on. This is the kind of person you can't really "talk" to and it crushes me that due to the fact that I am very enthusiastic about robotics and now due to the negative support I'm receiving from the team I might end up quitting Robotics and everything all together.

I'll give him another shot but give me advice please. I will try to talk to him and stuff but please shine some light on shadow that is covering up my life.

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FIRST-a-holic Anonymous mailbox is a place to share your concern and frustration about your FIRST experience anonymously. It is the perfect place if you just want someone to listen, or ask for advice when you don’t know what to do. Submit your letters today at the FIRST-a-holic anonymous mailbox forum. If you wish to respond to this thread anonymously, please PM Beth or Bharat with your response and thread title.

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