What is Your Team's Application Process?

[BlueLipstick]

Besides our initial recruitment meeting where the commitment of time and energy is stressed, we interview all our applicants and require written paragraphs to accompany these interviews. Usually the writing deters anyone who's not in it for the long haul, but we do see some students drop out as build season approaches. Throughout the season, grade checks keep unmotivated students from competing. Volunteer work is another integral part of our traveling expectations, so students who are generally not willing to put in the work will not come to competitions. A lot of times students who don't attend competitions never get fully invested in the program, and leave. The key is giving the students opportunities to earn their keep without forcing them.

In the end, you get out of FIRST what you put in.

[The other Gabe]

we let everyone in, and have preseason trainings that help us weed out those who don't really want to do it... build season does that too, though . while anyone can join, only those who give full commitment (determined either by hours, workload, or by our executive board when our hours tracking system failed) get financial assistance making it to competitions.

this year we had approx. 30 students, a disturbingly large amount of whom were seniors (we may need to start doing a bit more outreach... although my class (seniors) did always have a large amount of people in the club).

[jijiglobe]

The way we do it is we try to make sure everyone in the lab at any time is doing work. If there's always work to do then the people who are just there because they don't feel like going home will either do work or go somewhere else.

[sergioCorral842]

"Do you want to join?"
"Yes"
"Ok"

Same application goes for getting programmers.

In all seriousness, we let anyone join. However, we only take a limited amount of people to competitions (typically 20 or so) and that is determined through how much work people have done and how much they contribute to our team journal.

[AJCaliciuri]

Since Team 1305 is a community team, not a school team, we have continuous intake. Members will join through the summer all the way until the day before Championships.

We don't, however, have an application or screening process. We're in a smaller city, so we're not in a position to refuse students who'd like to join.

We do, however, do our best to find the area of the team that the students find the most intertesting and would like to contribute to, whether that be the Business team, Build Team, Stratgey Team etc.

If students come to meetings and do nothing or cause trouble, we always try to get them one on one with a mentor to work with them and enegage them. We've very rarely ever had to ask a student to leave the team.

[Lij2015]

This is all good info, and i wish our team could simply have uncaring people drop on their own!

With next year on the horizon, and what happened with our numbers joining this year after having a really good 2014 season we anticipate the numbers will grow even larger next year as we had an even better season this year.
With only 6-8 mentors to go around at a time we may simply hit a point in which deferring people is not to weed out but simply because of space limitations (as our team really can only hold 32 people)

[TogetherSword8]

We have a similar problem to the OP, we are limited to a shop space of only about 35-40 people, and that is including a room with no tools in it at all. As well as only having 3 mentors!
Solving the mentor problem is easier with the senior students, but the space problem has always been a deterrent to quite a few students. What we have found is by some small rotation, we can expand this number, but it does sound counterintuitive. We encourage our members to not only be a part of robotics, but to be involved with other groups in the school. I am involved in band and am the president of our It's Academic club, so I am often not arriving until 3 or 3:30 when we start at 2:15 daily. People involved in sports arrive after their practices, and by then other have left for work, or to go home to complete their homework. This rotation scheme is not formal, but it does allow us to increase our size beyond our shop's limits.

[Tungrus]

Originally Posted by Lij2015

This is all good info, and i wish our team could simply have uncaring people drop on their own!

Murphy's law...this ^^^ will never happen! They will stick with the team and their parents (in many cases) stop by competitions (who seems to be too busy to visit workshop or community outreach programs) and complain about robot or driving and why our team is not winning.

[GeeTwo]

Originally Posted by Lij2015

This is all good info, and i wish our team could simply have uncaring people drop on their own!

Originally Posted by Tungrus

Murphy's law...this ^^^ will never happen!

Not never - we had a bunch leave on their own. We had the same problem this year - more people interested in joining than our facility could handle. We didn't have any written application other than the usual medical and safety forms. What we did do was have "tryouts". Each mentor and several of the returning varsity team members (who did not have to try out) came up with challenges ranging from cutting out a piece of cardboard according to a blueprint to writing down how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich to building a tower out of blocks to modifying the standard arduino sweep() program to do a couple of fancier things. We ran tryouts in "stations" and graded both on aptitude and attitude. The tryouts were available on about eight evenings, and most students could get through it in six. About one-third of the original applicants never finished the process. We only had to "cut" a few more - and those were selected from the whiners and distractors. We would have also cut based on too low a "good enough" standard, but those all fell under the others anyway.

The attitude of this year's team was an order of magnitude better than last year's. As one of my co-workers said when told the story: personnel is policy. Select motivated people to start, and it won't take nearly as much to keep them going. We also had a much lower attrition rate from startup to the stop build than in previous years (<10% vice about 20%). I don't think we lost anyone between stop build and CMP.

Oh, yes, we used aptitude plus requests plus needs plus a few personal rules (e.g. boy friend and girl friend must be in separate departments) to select departments.

[MaGiC_PiKaChU]

Originally Posted by sergioCorral842

"Do you want to join?"
"Yes"
"Ok"

ctrl+c , ctrl+v

[cad321]

Back in 2013, Ontario faced bill 115 causing many teams to not be able to compete that year. Our team was fortunate enough that year to become considered an official course within our school allowing us to compete. We had similar issues with to many students the year before that (about 80 students total, not including mentors) and this allowed us to get an idea for who is going to actually be committed.

We made students write an essay as to why they feel they would benefit the team and also held an after school course that new members were required to attend. This course also went on their transcript meaning if they only sat around all day doing nothing, they would have a poor grade. This process made it quite clear who was ready to commit to the team and who wasn't.

After 2013 we have relaxed about the entry essay and who needs to take the after school course (dependent on what daytime courses you take/ your experience). However the after school course is really great IMO, because it shows students that this will take effort on their behalf. If they feel it's to much for them, they can stop before the actual build comes and helps keep our team at a manageable level.

All that being said, we still follow the model that anyone can join if they want to and try to ensure that we make our team as inclusive as we can.

[Louis_]

>First meeting lots of people
>Build season starts: "Wow you're still here?"
>They're on the team.