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Unread 17-03-2004, 15:00
ErikJ ErikJ is offline
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Re: College Students: How is your experience in FIRST?

Most people have hit up what was going to my big point - being a college student and running a FIRST team is a tough task. Matt Adams makes an important distinction - I'd have to say it's much harder to be on an all college mentor team than one that's mixed (I can say that b/c I've been on both - 128 originally had Ohio State students and AEP engineers, and now teams 677, 1014, and 1317 are nearly all Ohio State students (with a few parents here and there)). He also alludes to another big problem - turnover rates. It's very challenging to develop a self-sustaining team when, by definition, the turnover rate is quite high. We usually get 2 or 3 good years out of our mentors. How can you develop a team that is self sustaining while facing the challenging of having no long term mentors, other than potentially a professor (we've been blessed, others may not be so lucky)? We've tried to address that within our org structure and culture - it's important that we try to pass on our knowledge and cultivate younger members and groom them for the future. But, it's often a mixed bag. For us we've found it's much easier to find indians than cheifs, and how do you identify potential leaders in such a short time frame?

As far as college students serving as effective mentors, this is a topic I've thought about a great deal. In talking with our students, they find that it's easier to talk to us and ask us questions because we're much closer to them in age (this I think was the case when we had a mentor mix on team 128 as well). I also think (no offense) that we do a better job of explaining things to them, since it wasn't too long ago that we were in their shoes. Often times people will take the time to explain step 4 to someone without realizing the don't understand steps 0 through 3. I think we as college mentors avoid this pretty well (and team 1014 has an Engineering Inspiration Award that would agree with me). Granted, we're all still learning too - we make *plenty* of mistakes and stupid design choices that most engineers probably wouldn't make. But, in a way that's a good thing - the students learn from our failures just as much as we do.

We've also found that the students almost enjoy our underdog status - the lowly underfunded college team vs. the big scary engineers. For example, the students got a big kick when team 677 was picked as an alliance partner in Chicago 2002 - the picking team (sorry, don't remember who ) didn't realize that we were made of college students and an all girls high school. They really enjoyed the fact that we were picked on our merits, and were able to hold our own against the "real" engineers. The same goes for the college students as well. We get to pick on the other project teams who compete against only other college students - our competition has a huge experience advantage of us. It's nice to go into a competition and hold our own, and the lofty goal of performing well against the Andy Baker's and Joe Johnson's of the world serves as a great motivator.

How about another side question - what about students mentoring their old team once they graduate high school? We've only had one mentor sucessfully make the transition from mentee to mentor working with their "home" school. Having seen students come back, I think they often have a hard time fitting in in either realm - they still have friends they still talk to, so they (and their friends) have a hard time making that adjustment to authority figure and role model. The other mentors see them as still trying to fit in with the HS students and not make the leap, and their HS friends don't see them as a mentor. However, since we sponsor 3 teams, something we have had some sucess in is having students work as mentors after graduation, but with another school. That eliminates a lot of those problems. There's still the issue of the mentors "accepting" their former student as a peer, but that's never been an issue since we try to make an effort to treat the HS students as peers.

Another interesting side debate - how are all college teams (the OSU, Purdue, WPI, etc.) of the world viewed by the community at large? If you look down the list, those teams usually do well in competition, so it might be a non issue. But... are there stereotypes that we must overcome to be considered "sucessfull"?
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