Engineering Mentors Attitude/Role Towards Their NEM Counterparts

[MGoelz]

The beauty of FIRST is that there is a place for everyone. Not just every student, but every mentor as well. The only real reason there can be a niche for each and every student is because the mentors have come along to create those places. It doesn't matter what degree you hold or how much technical expertise you have when you're part of a team. Every contribution is valuable.

When it comes time to brainstorming, everyone on our team contributes. It's a wonderful way to get ideas. Oftentimes, when you have a team with members that have been there for awhile and have worked with the mentors for a couple of years, they will start thinking a bit of the same way. Sometimes, those not involved with the physical aspects of the robot can have the most interesting ideas. It's when you combine all of the best qualities of ideas that a team produces a fine robot.

Our team members treat our mentors equally. They all have value to us, and I can personally say I have learned something from each of them, engineering related or life related.

Another interesting thing about FIRST is that if you're around it long enough, you don't really need to have an engineering degree to understand how to design and build a robot. If you put someone that has been in FIRST ten years next to the brightest engineer from a sponsoring company and ask for ideas for a robot, I can almost guarantee that the person with the most FIRST experience will have the better and more feasible idea. FIRST is its own little wonderful world of robots and engineering and networking, where oftentimes experience outweighs technical expertise.