Member Turnover Issues

[Siri]

Originally Posted by thefro526

Last year we took 16 Students to Atlanta. 15 of them were Seniors, One of the was a Sophomore who's now our Captain and Driver.

This happened to us 2 years ago. We had almost 20 active students for Overdrive. For Lunacy, we had 7 (mostly due to graduation). We lost a good number of mentors around the same time. All but 3 of us were seniors, though I've come back as a mentor. We have a very young team this year, but thankfully (miraculously) we're back up to around 20 students. There's been significant loss of build and oversight experience, both in administration and fabrication, though. Fortunately, we picked up quite a few new mentors as well, a couple of whom are old hats in FIRST.

Our new model has 3 components:
1) Mentoring - focusing on students mentoring students, specifically seniors to underclassmen, but in reality anyone who can serve in that capacity for a given skill/task. Historically, we've haven't really guided the upperclassmen to this, though some of us tended towards it anyway. [This student-to-mentor transition sure makes first-person grammar really hard.]
2) Recruiting - lots of it! Get in the schools (we hope specifically the CAD, tech ed, etc classes) talk to the teachers, get in the community, demo to sponsors (perspective mentors and their kids), just talk a lot.
3) Retention - this hasn't really a big problem for us (other than the whole graduation thing), but it's always good to keep in mind. Robotics isn't for everyone, but if someone's drifting away it can be good to (nicely) ask why, just in case there's anything you can do. This question is usually better coming from a student (reduces chance of sounding accusatory). This can apply to mentors heading in a different direction as well. Even if they do come around less, it's good to keep in touch with them.

[Dragon Princess]

On our team Next year will be a massive turn over as over half the class will graduate, before it was only about five kids a year.

To prevent this from affecting us we take in huge amounts of rookies each year and 'crash course' train them in a specific field, that way our numbers stay high and even with normal age groups fluctuations we'll always have people still on them team.

We have invaluably found out that recruiting is very important.

[Dancin103]

I would not say we have member turn over issues, although we have our years where 16 seniors graduate, but then we just take on the same number of new members. Keep in mind for us 16 members is either half or way more than half of the team. On average we have 27 to 30 students on the team each year. I actually tried to run a regression analysis to see if member turnover created a variation of team success, and surprisingly, the answer is no. I was surprised at the outcome, but at the same time it made sense in that the team does not change how it operates, it just changes members.

BTW this is my 341st post, yay Miss Daisy.

Cass

[Jeffy]

Originally Posted by TheFish

I'm not talking about recruiting so much... but more the fact that I can assume most teams have seniors leading (clearly with the most experience). So I'm wondering if there is a void whenever those seniors leave.

I'm assuming the most important solution is just training and education for the underclassmen right?

Do most teams spread out work evenly amongst all grade levels or let the leaders/seniors do most of the work?

Although your team captain may be a senior, I would doubt that all of the leaders on your team are seniors.

We always seem to have a #2 for every position on the team, and that is who will step up and lead the group.

Mentors are a great help in this because they are all seasoned verterans. After the seniors leave, the mentors work with the new leaders of the team and as the season goes on, the mentors lead less and less and the students lead more.

[Warren Boudreau]

We have a mandatory "adopt a rookie" policy. Every veteran, especially the seniors, is expected to work with a rookie and teach them how they do things.