Resources per Student

[Cothron Theiss]

So here is a thread discussing optimal team size, where GeeTwo gave what I think is just a phenomenal answer.

Originally Posted by GeeTwo

There are teams that are too big, and there are teams that are too small. There are probably teams that are too big with more members than other teams that are too small.

The appropriate size for your team is a function of a number of variables, the most important of which are resources. If you have a big enough budget, enough space, and enough dedicated mentors (including one "big enough" to tie it all together), you can have a team of 100 members building robots, doing videos, award presentations, outreach, and mentoring of other teams and be looking for more members. If you have a $10k budget, a single car garage for a build site, and one mentor, ten student members building robots Jan-May and writing awards and doing outreach Aug-Dec may be too many.

Grow your team resources as you grow your team membership.

I have a question for the general FIRST community that is similar but different enough I thought it warranted its own thread.
Roughly how many dollars per student in your team's budget? I'm sure this is a number that fluctuates, but I feel like this is one that may be more constant across teams and across teams' history than actual team size. For my own experience, I know my team's 2015 budget was around $30,000 with around 30 students. So, $1000 per student, the same as the hypothetical team that GeeTwo mentioned in his reply to the thread on Team Size. However this year, my team's budget and number of students went down (productivity arguably went up), to about $700 per student.

So what do other teams work with in regards to dollars per student, and how have you seen that affect your productivity and success in competitions?

[GeeTwo]

Last year, as of the end of build season, we had a budget of about $500 per student ($20-25K, 50 students). When we won a berth to CMP, we stepped up and raised our budget for the year to about $800 or $900 per. We managed to keep some of the sponsors picked up in the CMP blitz. I think we're at about $35-$40k, and only had 25 students. While we should have a similar dollar budget next year, we may lose much of our space (including the best location for our large cutting). We'd really like to pick the team back up to 30-35, but we may not be able to for lack of space. The next "big thing" to do as we (hopefully) keep building our budget is a second regional event each year.

Backing up again, the resources you really need to grow to add team members are more in the realm of mentors, space, and equipment than dollars. This is due to the high "fixed costs" of FIRST, including registration and the costs of fielding a robot as compared to the "margin costs" of travel and such. If you double team size, you'll need nearly twice as many mentors and twice as much space, but only about 20 or 30% more money to do similar activities with more people. More money lets you do more things, assuming you have enough people resources to make it happen.

Edit: We have eight "full time" mentors and another five to seven "part time" mentors for the 25 team members, which allows mentors to work with fairly small groups, and that's a good thing.