I’m very curious how long it takes other mentors to get to their team’s primary meeting place (one way). This poll is for adult mentors. If you’re a student on a team, please only vote on the student poll.
Prediction: People will be willing to drive longer to work than robots, because money. Will be interested to see how this ends up though.
House is about 10 minutes away, though we purchased said house after having been on the team for a while, so I’d be lying if commute time wasn’t at least on the list of considerations. My work commute goes one of two ways: either another 5 minutes past robotics, or 15 minutes in the opposite direction. Not bad by any stretch of the imagination.
I know a handful of mentors who drive 60+minutes. But, they also do that for work - the usual day is to drive “into town” for both work and mentoring.
There’s a running joke around our town about how everything is about a 20 minute drive away. There’s actually a bit of truth to it: the river & bluff system, the major roadways that built up around it, and more congested streets in between make travel time quite non-linear with as-the-bird-flies distance. Definitely moreso than most Illinois towns.
One of the things in my list of projects is to learn some Google Maps API and put some numbers behind these feelings.
This is a really interesting survey. The school where I mentor is a short detour from my normal commute to work in a sub-urban setting. Making it easy to “drop by” for me. However, in our numerous attempts to recruit new mentors, the commute time as always been a negative factor as our team is neither down-town, neither close to the technology hub where a lot of people work. Adding 40-45 minutes to their commute is problematic. And for Alumni attending our local universities, leveraging the bus system requires more like an hour both ways (Special thanks to these dedicated folks). The poll survey results seems to reflect this reality we are facing.
My commute for work is ~5 minutes, and my commute for 3468 is ~35 min away in the next larger city.
My only saving grace is that my hours are flexible enough I can come in early, leave at 3:00pm to go to the meetings, and make up any hours deficit at work the other days of the week.
Not that I’m actively looking to jump ship on 3468, but they’d better watch out if Ruston High ever got a team, a 5min commute to a robotics team would be tempting.
Since I’ve been a mentor for 4607 my commute has never been shorter than 90 minutes, which is what it is now. It’s been as long as 180 minutes… I primarily show up in person on weekends, and mentor remotely during the week.
Ignore one of the mentor workplace <10 minutes. I can’t read apparently. I (student) live 5ish minutes away by car and about 12 by bike, which is what I mostly use.
