I’ve been mentoring the Killer Bees for about 5 solid years now (before that I was sort of a junior mentor and a student on the team). I have my degree in English, and my mentoring role can best be described by the nickname that my students call me: Mom. I also head up the Chairman’s submission effort, and handle other marketing areas.
I love “my” engineers, and have a unique relationship with them, as I’m younger than they are (which has created a bit of a “little sister/big brother” relationship between us) and am one of the main NEMs on the team, but enjoy being a part of the design/robot process as well. I’m sure that other team’s mentors have unique relationships with each other.
I’m curious:
What is the attitude of the Engineer/Mechanical mentors towards the Non-Engineering Mentors (NEMs) on their team?
Vice versa?
What is the student attitude towards the NEMs on your team? How does it differ from their attitude towards the Engineering/Mechanical mentors?
I feel that the NEM mentors on the team are really the big picture people. They might not have all of the technical answers, but they’re the first people to consult with proposals about fundraising ideas, purchases, and other events. But, our NEM is also extremely interested in why we take a certain route, and although she is a NEM, she is very knowledgeable about the robot itself, and what it does.
The overall attitude towards the NEM is one of playfullness. We have fun, we mock our mentor for getting lost and stuff, but we all understand that when it’s time to get serious, we focus and work with the mentor to get things done.
Our attitudes towards the mentors is one of overall respect, but I feel that there is not a bit of difference between how our attitudes towards the different mentors are. We’re always looking for fun, and if the mentors are willing to have fun as well, it doesn’t matter if it’s a EM or a NEM, it’s always a party.
Without ours, we wouldn’t eat dinner every night, we wouldn’t have lunch at competitions, our fundraisers would be in shambles… basically our team would fall apart.
Without them, the team is not a team.
They play as big a role in supporting the team, and inspiring the students, as any Engineer.
May I use you as an example? A degree in English? Seriously?
Words can’t express how much your contributions adds to a team! Guiding them in the Chairman’s submission effort is fantastic!! Any chance you could split your time with our team?? Please!!
You see, spell check was invented for Engineers like me. :yikes:
Well, we don’t have that many “non-engineer” mentors on our team, but the ones we do have are just as important as the engineering mentors. Everything we do that is outside of the robot, although most people won’t do it, is just as important as the robot. You can get to Nationals by winning regionals (I won’t go into the MI format), or winning matches, but you can also get there by winning awards, good scouting, ect. So, we value all our mentors equally as important.
They are mentors. They are our leaders. They are our teachers. They are our friends.
As far as I am concerned they are no different than Engineering mentors they just teach us a different skill set. One which, imho, is much more important.
I can definitely agree with the above in that they’re really the same. I think the main difference lies in which mentors a student interacts with more, rather than the teachings of those mentors. For example, many of the more electrically-inclined members of our team say “You’re killing me!” the favorite phrase of our main electrical mentor. Similarly, other students pick up habits from their “preferred” mentors.
What I’m saying is, student-mentor relations are based on interaction, not the role of the mentors themselves. (Not so sure about mentor-mentor relations, but that’s not really my question to answer)
I had a nice discussion with a former student who specialized in the non-engineering side of the team while she was with us. She’s now mentoring for another team. Towards the end of the discussion, it was bluntly, but truthfully, stated, “you need a leader.”
We have a few NEMs on the team this year, but they are very focused in specific roles. We have EMs that also take on non-engineering tasks…some with greater success than others.
When we had that non-engineering leader (I won’t say NEM because at the time she wasn’t a mentor), the team ran a lot smoother (more smoothly? No English degree here!).
In general though, other than having two separate rooms (not by choice) for robot work and for “other” work (computer based), there is no distinction made between EM and NEM on our team. Everyone is a team member. Everyone is a family member. Both serve distinct yet vital roles and one cannot function without the other.
We, unfortunately, have about a 50:1 member-to-pure NEM ratio. She does a fantastic job (good thing, because otherwise we’d starve), but that means a lot of us EMs (can I say that?) do NEM work as well, which can be even more exhausting. As for the relationships, we’re a very close-nit team with a pretty good round-table management system. It’s hard to draw the EM-NEM line when you’re just watching people interact. Yes, EMs and NEMs have different perspectives, but I dare say a lot of that’s up to our personalities rather than our positions. We have some–quite a few, actually–very “big picture” as well as technical EMs, and a few that stick more on the technical side.
Since FIRST does not dictate how a team is structured, many teams do not recognize NEMs or parents as “mentors” - only the technical people or engineers are considered mentors.
I have very strong opinions on this! :yikes: FRC teams are most often small businesses which need the business people, human resource people, marketing, etc. in order to be successful. So I’m surprised when I encounter teams which do not recognize all of the adults who work with students as equal “mentors.” If a team has done sufficient teambuilding in the fall they will discover that there is no room for attitudes from any member of the team, adult or student.
If you’re not familiar with NEMO (Non-Engineering Mentor Organization) please visit our website to learn more: www.firstnemo.org.
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.
Be careful with this line of thinking. Any one can come up with an idea but often times it is the real engineers who get it to work. (Not taking anything away from non-engineers but belittling the work an engineer went through to get their title irks me)
The situation on my team is a slightly different from the norm since the majority of our mentors are college students who had done FIRST as high schoolers and are currently enrolled in engineering at the University of Michigan.
This considered, our mentor base is (and has been for the last two years) divided into the following: mentors and senior mentors. The mentors, who are generally first- or second-years on the team and may still be getting accustomed to the busy schedules of college, focus on technical aspects. The senior mentors, on the other hand, focus on both technical and non-technical aspects.
For us, the mentor structure has helped to show the students that they can get the best of more than one world. I have noticed that students who had been focused on the technical aspect of FIRST before are now doing things such as organizing service events, running demos, taking care of media, and giving tours to VIPs at events in addition to their designing and building.
I’d switch out the word, title, for degree or degrees. There has just been a post in this thread about college mentors who lead teams. They don’t have their degrees and are not engineers but they are leading teams. That doesn’t belittle anyone.
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One attitude that I’ve encountered over many years of talking with NEMS and technical mentors is the food side of things. “If the NEMS didn’t feed us, we’d starve”, kind of thing. That is a ‘volunteer’ to me; that is not a NEM. Where it can become a NEM process is if the person mentors others in how to feed a team. Otherwise, it is a volunteer finding a way to feed a team.
There are so many aspects to the non-technical sides of the team that must be handled well to have sustainability and consistency. The work that is done by the NEMS is, indeed, valuable. It has been mentioned in this thread that there are technical mentors and engineers who have excellent skill sets in the non-engineering aspects of running the team and they apply those skill sets. This is good as long as a technical mentor is not taking away from the robot side of things to devote time to the organizational and business side of things or working with the awards sub-team. Too many times you see this and you see the mentors stretching themselves too thin. If it is out of necessity because there are not other mentors available then that is one thing. If it is because the technical mentors/engineers want to do the NEM work, that is another thing. If it is because the technical mentors/engineers want to control every aspect of the whole team - that is quite another. Recognizing the value of the work done by the NEMs and seeking NEMS to help the team is just as important as seeking out engineers and technical mentors to work with the team. Then, the real fun begins with everyone learning to work together. We can see the success of achieving this in many of our Hall Of Fame teams.
Nope, it is a title. Regulation and licensure in engineering - Wikipedia A degree does not make you an engineer. My friend for example, is not an engineer, he is a person who holds a BS in Electrical Engineering.
In some places it is actually illegal to call yourself an Engineer without having met certain requirements. As one of those College Students helping to run a team (come by 397 and see how many people over the age of 24 are involved in our team) I have no problem admitting I am not an Engineer yet. I still hold that as a goal of mine. (Except CS majors cannot become PEs in the state of Michigan)
I have **lots **of FIRST experience. Almost 10 years. I’ve worked with teams, hung out with some really cool VIPs, given countless presentations, helped run events, done thousands of hi fives, met lots and lots of incredible volunteers, and best of all, have interacted with thousands of students.
I know almost nothing about building a robot.
I leave that to the technical mentors.
What drew me into FIRST and kept me engaged was problem-solving, teamwork and partnerships.
But years ago Kathie and I (and another mentor named Cheryl) started talking about all the work we were doing on a team and it had nothing to do with building a robot. In one conversation we made up the word “non-engineering” mentor to describe what we were doing (it was a joke - never meant it to stick) and NEMO was launched. It’s fun to see how this label has stuck in the FIRST world and to meet all the great mentors who play these important roles on the teams.
