My team is based in the inner cities of Paterson and Newark. We are having a difficult time retaining it graduating seniors to assist the team mostly due to them being in college full time and also holding jobs. We are looking to raise funds to pay college mentors stipend. What are your suggestions on how to handle this as well as pay. We are just looking for ideas from anyone with previous experience.
I’ve found 1st year college students return for a few meetings then get too busy and stop returning. I don’t know if paying them would make them stick around.
Stipends for professional mentors might help entice them to attend and help the team.
From my own experience, people stick around because they love the team dynamic, love helping students, and feel that their contributions matter. Raising funds to purchase tools and materials that allow the students to be active at all times would be a better investment than sending the $ out the door with college students.
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As a former college mentor that probably should have focused on college more, it sounds like they are doing the right thing by not mentoring. College is a lot of work and should take priority. There are threads on the merits of mentoring in college that we don’t need rehashed here. Additionally, there are threads about coming back to your former team after just graduating that might be of interest.
In terms of getting and sustaining mentorship you could try the following.
- Reaching out to your sponsors to see if there is anyone that might want to lend their time/experience. (Purdue/Caterpillar sponsor us and provide an “In” to a network of people)
- Make sure that the mentors are able to contribute. (Some years we’ve had an influx of mentors vs students and there just weren’t enough kids to go around.)
- Don’t lean too heavily on them. (I’ve seen mentors get burned out and step away due to the team needing them too much)
- Create a welcoming environment. (Our mentors have dinner once a week with some of the other local mentors)
A stipend for professional mentors might be nice but I think most people are mentoring not for monetary reasons. (Insert You Guys are Getting Paid? Meme)
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Former college mentor here -
Focus on college as a freshman - junior. Once you’re a senior then I’d mentor.
Anyways, the school I mentored at had 1 assistant coach position for robotics, so I was able to get that. It wasn’t much but enough to pay for gas and maybe some food
It’s not enough to convince me to mentor if I wasn’t going to, but it’s a nice to have since I was a broke college kid
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Do you have alumni at a local engineering school? As someone who mentored while at a college 2 hours from the build space, its a terrible idea and you need alumni who are crazy not a stipend to make that happen. Having alumni come back for a few particular days like kickoff or mock kickoff/ training day is much easier to arrange.
Even though my team is now mostly mentored by alumni, I don’t know of any sure way to make that happen. We had a couple alumni chose mentoring over jobs/social lives/college eng. teams and that was enough to get a few more come back after college.
If you have the money, a stipend might help a local alumni justify not working January- May, but in our case everyone is here to have fun and the money is better spent on tools and parts.
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The reasons to do FRC in college vastly differ from the reasons you did it in highschool. It’s not about building a robot, but building other students. You like want to look to see if your college has a stem education program that you could pull mentors from.
I’m one of the few who I believe it was absolutely pivotal that I continued to mentor, but my interests lie in a different space than most.
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Why is your focus on retaining graduating seniors to assist the team? The transition from high school to the next thing such as college, trade school, or a job is one of the biggest transitions in life. Trying to fit mentoring into the mix is rarely successful. So many Seniors express interest in coming back to the team since they had great experiences. However, once their post-graduation life starts up, they find they are having new great experiences and new workloads and high school FRC just fades away.
As you try to find mentors to assist the team, I’d recommend focusing on:
- Young professionals who have been at a job long enough to be comfortable with that part of life and who are looking for “something more”
- Parents/guardians of team members who have knowledge or skills needed by the team
- More seasoned professionals who recognize they could be energized by working with high school students and who “want to give back”
- College Seniors who never gave up on the idea of helping the team, but now have a little bit of bandwidth if their Senior course load is less than full.
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We had a big boom in college mentors for the 2019 season (most of which wanted to focus on the mechanical side). We don’t have a have a huge shop so every machine was in use with a 1:1 or 2:1 student to mentor ratio just about the whole season. There were meetings where the tech mentors just didn’t have anything they could contribute to (or wanted to contribute to).
Part of the issue is that most of these new mentors were only 1 year removed from being on a high school team and hadn’t quite got the new dynamic of being a teacher vs a do-er.
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Our team has had great success with PhD students! We posted a job description at UC Berkeley and have 2 PhD students helping the team. We have done this since our rookie season in 2020. It has worked very well. We pay a minimal stipend.
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Do you know that money is what is holding back recent alum from coming back to mentor? You should poll folks who have turned you down and find out the reason.
If the answer is “I need those hours for my job which makes me money,” you might be able to compete, but that’s hardly the whole story. Let’s say the college student is working 15 hours a week (of course some students work significantly more, some significantly less, and some not at all) doing an on-campus job where they’re making minimum wage. For argument, let’s use the effective minimum wage (basically the average minimum wage across the U.S. of $11.80. Over a 14-week period (build + competition season), that amounts to about $2,500 and there very well may be some other benefits attached. Some teams can probably afford to pay a $2,500 stipend for the season, and many others probably cannot.
I’m guessing, though, that this isn’t the full story. Some other possible components to the story:
- The job is providing other skills they don’t already have or they want to try something new (they just spent four years building robots!)
- The job is on campus or near campus, more convenient for them than getting to a nearby high school
- It has nothing to do with a job (and, for this, there could be hundreds of valid reasons, many of them mentioned in this thread already)
You can certainly get to the bottom of this. Without applying any pressure, simply ask your alumni what leads them to the decision not to return as mentors. If it’s really about them wanting to be compensated for their time, this is a fair, valid request, though there has to be some understanding that your team may not be in a position to accommodate this. If it’s about anything else, there’s a chance you can accommodate their desires, but most likely, they just want to be a college student and try new things.
Take it from someone who did their entire undergrad in 2.5 years: college is short and there’s never enough time to do it all. There will always be time, after graduating, to revisit what once was.
And, I’ll leave you with this quote from Parks and Rec, especially the bolded parts:
Leslie Knope: Because it’s my dream job.
Jennifer Barkley: Then dream bigger. Look, you love this town. It’s being run by monsters and morons? Get a better job! Rise above their heads. Affect change at a higher level. Don’t be the kid that graduates high school, hangs out in the school parking lot. Be the woman who moves away, climbs the ladder, and then confidently comes back and [redacted for YPP] just for kicks.
Leslie Knope: Is that what you did?
Jennifer Barkley: Yeah. [redacted for YPP] Look, Pawnee has done you a favor. You’ve outgrown them. You’ve got talent, and you’ve got name recognition. Which means that you have a bright, wide-open future with a thousand options. State Senate. Federal jobs. Even congress. All of these are doable for you. And you can trust me… because I don’t care enough about you to lie.
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- This seems like an XY problem—trying to diagnose the attempted solution rather than the underlying problem itself.
- A very smart fella once wrote a pretty good blog post about why mentoring an FRC robotics team in college is not a good idea. I suggest giving it a read; it’s got lots of good points that could be why alumni (quite sensibly, imo) don’t want to immediately return after graduating.
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Make sure your team has an online communications platform that sees regular use, and keep in touch with your recent alums that way. A lot of useful mentoring can be done virtually.
In-person mentoring as a college student can be a bad idea for a number of reasons, but that doesn’t mean you have to lose access to all of the knowledge and experience that your graduating seniors have. It just becomes less immediately available.
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