Mentors VS Students

[JesseK]

Originally Posted by Ben Englert

Unfortunately my experience with mentors has been largely negative. Obviously, it is colored by my experiences. I'd been meaning to start my own thread on this while CD was still nice and active around the build thing, but this one is as good as any.

Background: I was recently "fired" from my team after a particular mentor decided that I have an impossible personality. She said to the faculty representative from my school that she would leave if I wasn't asked to, so he "chose" her simply because the maelstrom that would have been kicked up around her departure is an order of magnitude larger than the one I managed to make.

My initial problem with this was that there had been no warning and no one had asked me to change my attitude or the way I dealt with my peers. Furthermore I felt that part of the goal of FIRST is to teach people how to work in a team environment, so if someone is difficult and not good at teamwork, I would hope that a team and mentors would work with that individual to improve their skills rather than just kicking them off. In addition I feel that mentors should be role models in their actions as well as their words, and "I'll quit if you don't fire him" doesn't seem to be a very mature action, nor one you would want future business leaders to emulate.

My point here? It's possible for mentors to ACTUALLY be wrong. I know it's easy to feel like they're wrong all the time because of our teenagerly self-righteous tunnel vision, and equally easy to refute that viewpoint because they're older so obviously they have more experience and therefore better intuition. I feel the true answer lies somewhere in the middle: Everyone can be wrong sometimes and nobody's perfect.

You sound like you're exactly the way I was in high school. I too got this medicine, but not from a FIRST team. Looking back, there WERE several clues, hints, and sometimes obvious, blatant suggestions that I simply ignored. Things like this never "just happen". The mentor probably didn't just have a "I'll quit if you don't fire him" attitude -- it was probably a "I'm getting stressed, and burnt out by dealing with this person" attitude, at which point the leadership HAD to chose. If you're anything like I was, you didn't change your attitude at all to accomodate such a situation.

I hate that you're missing such a great opportunity, however perhaps you can ask to make amends with that mentor. Hopefully your maelstrom-style bridge burning wasn't so bad that you can't go back and apologize. If not, hopefully there's next year.