Responsibilities of a Mentor

[4throck]

It seems that many people are completely misunderstanding the "black magic" analogy that Kelly and Rachel have brought up. Perhaps this will clear it up.

The idea is something like this. Most people's conception of engineering is that an engineer goes into a room for a while, produces blueprints through black magic, which then [black] magically get turned into some really useful/cool technology. People understand that this happens, and they might even have a good idea of how it happens. You can watch a TV special on, say, the Manhattan Project, and look at every single step that they took when designing what they were working on. This would be roughly analogous to students watching a mentor designed and built robot. What would be more useful (and inspiring, perhaps), would be for the students to do it themselves. There is a big gap between watching someone else go through the process and doing it yourself. When the intellectual and technological burden is on you, and you are able to make a functioning and overall decent (at least) robot, you can see the engineering process as a whole, and, what's more, come out with the knowledge and confidence that you can do this, that you can solve the problem and work from there.

I was in the same class and team as Kelly and Rachel (1418, GMHS '07), and on my first year ('05), and every year afterwards I worked on the robot, I was able to look back on that bot and understand that the process of engineering wasn't simply the black magic of super-geniuses like Feynman, Oppenheimer, etc., but a process of solving problems that I could understand and work through myself.

If that ain't inspiration, then I don't know what is.

p.s. Way to default to masculine pronouns even when the person in question is named Kelly. Gender neutral at least, come on.