Responsibilities of a Mentor

[CommanderRachek]

Originally Posted by FourPenguins

The issue of mentor involvement in robot design and construction has been beat to death, so that's not what I'm asking here.

Instead, I want to know what CDers think about the duties of a mentor. What are their responsibilities when it comes to running the team? Chaperoning the team? Teaching the students? Who should spearhead fund raising efforts? Corporate relations? Public relations?

It seems to me you can't really separate those two questions. The question of how a mentor should be involved will necessarily be tied up in their role in design and construction. After all, that is the central activity on any team: building the robot.

My experience as a team member and as a loosely-involved college student mentor has shown me that having the students be as involved as possible in every aspect of running the team is the ideal. The functions of a mentor should be limited to (in order of importance):

1) making sure the students don't hurt themselves with all those fun toys power tools they're working with.

2) corralling the students so that they can use their time effectively. This necessarily must include helping the STUDENT leaders of the group to a) gain moral authority and b) exercise their own leadership skills.

3) offering advice and expertise where needed with the caveat that it is THEIR ROBOT and they are free to ignore you as much as they want on this score.

Of these three, only number (1) is absolutely necessary. Safety is the only issue on which a mentor ever should put his/her foot down and force a student to do/not do something. The other two roles could theoretically be done without. Practically speaking, it is beneficial to have an adult around who can answer questions and provide leadership, but both of those roles should be as limited as possible. The ideal mentor's role is defined by what the kids need them to do, not by what the mentor wants or can do better than them. The mentor works for the team, not the other way around.

Kelly mentioned banning mentors from the pits. I, personally, would like to see this, though I understand that it's not going to happen any time soon. However, I think a good step in the right direction would be to make the "coach" position on the drive team limited to students only. Even if you have the best, least overbearing, most supportive mentor in the world, even if your mentor could do the "coach" job better than anyone else, that is a position that should be taken by a student. Fostering student leadership is a very important part of mentoring a FIRST team, and requiring the "coach" to be a student would be a step towards encouraging that.

To touch on the no-mentors-in-the-pits thing again: the fact that this was suggested by one of our sponsors (and not a student or even a mentor) is, I think, very telling. He is exactly the sort of person FIRST needs in order to expand: owners of midsize engineering firms with resources available for teams. He wasn't exactly scrutinizing other teams pits, but it was still clear to him that there were a number of teams with over-involved mentors, and it looked pretty bad to him. Obviously, one person is not a representative sample, but his attitude is surely not isolated. I believe that if FIRST wants to become truly mainstream, they are going to have to change their attitude on that issue.