As the season is winding down and seniors are headed off the colleges around the world, I wanted to encourage people to stay involved with FRC in college. (If any other college mentors have advice please post too!)
For a little background, my name is Jason Ang and I am also a senior (but in college at Purdue University). I was a member of Team 192 in high school and as a freshman at Purdue, I joined Purdue FIRST Programs in order to continue being involved in FRC. I was placed on Team 4272, a team with few students and even fewer mentors and as a freshman I saw my team struggle and at times we thought we would fold, but now as a senior, we’re making our first appearance at worlds and students that I mentored my freshman year are now the leaders of the team.
No matter where you’re going or what role you had on your team before, FIRST TEAMS NEED YOU. Find a team around you that could use your help and reach out to them. Even if you’re only there twice a week or even once a week, you are an incredible resource to any FRC team. You have value and you can make a tangible impact on FIRST students.
Additionally, mentoring a team didn’t stifle my experience of college, I was still able to join a fraternity and meet many people, but I gained so much more out of mentoring than I could’ve imagined. Giving back to FRC lets you stay involved and opens the doors to so many opportunities (who knows maybe even an internship at AndyMark :P).
Looking back on the (nearly) 4 years spent as a college mentor for FRC, I have learned so much from teaching and mentoring and I hope that this post can encourage more graduation seniors to find a local team near them to support.
I will be speaking at St. Louis about Purdue FIRST Programs and how to stay involved with FRC after high school on Friday at 1:30pm in Room 265. If you have any questions about mentoring in college or any interest at all, please come check out our conference or PM me.
I’ve posted at length about this in the relevant thread, but will repeat it here briefly:
Be wary of burnout. It will sneak up on you, and when it hits, it is not fun.
It is entirely possible to be an involved mentor and a successful college student at the same time. It is not, however, easy. Your body has limits, and you may not learn where those are until it’s too late.
Your health is your number one priority. Don’t compromise it.
As a fellow college mentor, I can definitely agree that mentoring has helped teach me a lot about how to work with a team and be a leader beyond what I was able to do as a student. It’s been an incredibly positive experience.
However, mentoring in college isn’t for everyone. I’ve seen lots of young mentors, (even some beyond college) who are too invested and still treat it like they are a student. An important thing to remember as a mentor is winning is much less important the education you are giving to your students. If you feel you can take that step back as a mentor to teach before competing, as well as balance it with schoolwork and becoming an adult (which isn’t a bad thing, college and life can be hard!) then go for it! Mentoring can be incredibly rewarding. I’ve never felt happier as a FIRST member than when my students come up to me and thank me for being their mentor.
Great post Jason! Not sure if you remember but we met at SVR and the Championship last season (I’m Nick, from Team 5940 B.R.E.A.D.). Happy to hear you’re doing well and I’m bummed I didn’t get to see you this season - hopefully next year!
An alternative way to stay involved that requires less time commitment (lowers the chance of burnout) is to volunteer at local events. Quite a few alumni from Houston area teams return to work as Referees, Inspectors, etc. and they do a great job. For some, it is an hour or two of driving. Some have to fly in. My guess is they combine it with family visits. No doubt, some of the alumni are volunteering at events local to where they are going to school too.
Like any other extracurricular, FRC must not come before health or your grades.
As a sophomore in college, I had an incredibly tough schedule and could only be a mentor 1 - 2 hours a week (mostly on the weekends). The students gave me the name “MIA”, a nickname that I still hear occasionally from them now. No matter how often you can help, I want people to know that even a small amount of time can give the students a resource they would never otherwise have.
That being said I have drive coached 3 events already and am leaving for worlds today and the burnout is definitely closing in on me
Thanks for posting an important perspective/reality to mentoring and being a college student. I may have glorified it in a light that might not suit everyone.
I wholeheartedly agree and I hope my enthusiasm as a mentor does not push incoming college freshman to be the “all day every day” mentors if they can’t be.
I’m glad you also had a positive experience working with FRC as a mentor!
Of course I remember! I’m bummed I didn’t get to go SVR this year… Love your team and I hope B.R.E.A.D. had a good season. Hopefully I’ll end up out in California when I graduate!
As someone who mentored several teams during my college years my advice to those who are interested is DON’T, volunteer at events instead. Your social life and grades will thank you.
I partially disagree. I personally coach 4272 while attending Purdue University for Mechanical Engineering. If you are passionate about mentoring, be a mentor. There are many college students that are very happy mentoring.
That being said, mentoring in college is not for every FIRST alum. It is a HUGE time commitment, and balancing it with school work can sometimes be challenging, but is not impossible.
If you want to help FIRST, but don’t want to devote huge hours to it, volunteer at events. If you are extremely passionate about FIRST and want to put in the hours to mentor, i highly encourage you to do so.
I agree that mentoring and volunteering in college are some of the most fulfilling things I’ve done with my time at NDSU. It’s opened up so many opportunities for me, and helped to define what I’ll be doing post college.
I would add that if you’re going to a college/university that doesn’t currently have an established FIRST Support Organization (Purdue FIRST, GOFIRST, Bison Robotics, etc.) It’s a really rewarding challenge to start one. Having an official student organization in place makes things like volunteering and mentoring a lot easier. This is because your student organization can work with the university to excuse absences for students who are gone volunteering. It also becomes easier to fund volunteer trips as the university will often times provide funding for student organizations.
Another benefit that stems from starting a robotics student organization is that you can continue to compete in robotics competitions while in college. Bison Robotics competes in the NASA Robotic Mining Competition, a small (15lb, 40 team) Battlebots competition, an autonomous snowplow competition, a quadcopter competition, etc. The experience gained at these competitions opens up so many opportunities.
I you’d like help in starting a robotics organization at your school just PM me. I started Bison Robotics at NDSU my freshman year and we’ve grown to over 120 students. There are a lot of tricks and things that I wish I would’ve known at the beginning!
Very cool to see Purdue FIRST Programs going strong. Great job to 4272 this year, you all had a great robot that was simple and effective.
Really when it comes down to it, it’s an individual decision. Know your limits, maybe take your freshman year off and just volunteer. If your time management skills aren’t so good, hold off. FIRST will still be there when you graduate and will still be looking for able-bodied mentors.
I made some amazing friends mentoring 1646 in college, had a lot of fun and wouldn’t change that decision.
I helped mentor my team as the programming mentor this year and luckily, my winter break was basically until the end of January. I was able to help for around a month physically and then did code review, vision, and bug fixes remotely through GitHub. I also visited during a long weekend in February and went to competition which lined up with my spring break.
Honestly, it’s not too bad at all. I feel like programming positions are easier to do remotely. I don’t see the problem with helping during the winter break at all. Especially that you can get so much more done during the day because you don’t have to go to school.
We’ll see how that pans out next year because I am taking some more difficult classes next semester.
I was also in Purdue FIRST, mentoring team 1747 for four years (highest mentor attendance rate for several of them) – don’t regret it at all, and my grades weren’t affected. It was good for me as an Industrial Engineer, since most of the Industrial Engineering college competitions were mostly focused on paper-writing, and it was an outlet where I could work on process improvement problems and see direct impact.
That being said, other individuals didn’t necessarily experience the same result. There’s no blanket advice you can really give here. Everybody is in a different situation.
I made a ton of friends, so I don’t regret my time in FRC in college, but don’t feel bad if you want to do something else that isn’t as education-focused. There are dozens of other engineering competitions where you can learn something cool in whatever discipline you go into (they don’t always have the scale or altruistic mission of FRC mentoring though, which is why I always came back).
Learning how to be a mentor and not just an older student can be difficult, especially if you’re mentoring your former team. Mentoring a different team than you started on can be useful for this, and it also shows you how different teams work.
I’d also recommend making sure to limit your time at robotics as a college student mentor- perhaps by limiting yourself to a few days a week you’ll be in the shop, or by alotting time for other activities- like getting your work done and hanging out with friends.
Don’t pass up on internship opportunities or let your grades slip due to mentoring. Your education needs to be your #1 priority. It’s hard to fathom as a high schooler how much more difficult college can get, especially in engineering. Many of you who cruised by in high school will need to learn study habits and time management to get things done, let alone mentor a team in the meantime.
Source: Currently in my third year of Mechanical Engineering and also mentoring a team
I have to join the choir of college mentors who don’t regret it. I think this is the case for a lot of people: if I weren’t mentoring FRC, I’d be just as involved in a project team, and it would be affecting my grades/health a similar amount*. Many project teams have terrible culture around those things! I should also say that mentoring FRC well is incredibly hard, incredibly rewarding, and very different from being on or leading a college project team. You have to be some combination of a mentor, a project manager, a coach, a teacher, and a role model; each of those is tough individually. It took a couple years for me to get good enough to become aware of all the mistakes I was making. That’s aside from the technical knowledge you gain just from looking at an FRC robot from a higher level, although it’s different and probably less than you’d get from a college project team, depending on the team. Altogether, I’m happy to have exited a project team and instead have taken a leadership role on an FRC team.
*which is not all that much, even though I’ve been able to do the other things I’ve wanted to do: start FAMNM, have fun, stage a student government coup, etc. No idea how, but everything worked itself out.
I have had a good experience mentoring the past two years, and am proud of the progress my team has made.
Regardless, when I hear students now saying that they want to come back and mentor, it makes me feel uneasy. If you want to come back, I encourage you to know EXACTLY what you want to help with and accomplish. Too many of the students I am hearing want to come back do not fit anywhere specifically, and I am worried they will come back to be more social than anything.
I took 2 years off, then started mentoring my junior year. Taking those years off was KEY for developing the “what are my students getting from this?” perspective, and beginning to separate myself from the robot - a journey I’m still on.
I probably should have taken two more years off. Don’t get me wrong, I learned a ton from my years on Team 4 and wouldn’t trade it for the world, but it wasn’t the most responsible decision I’ve made - especially when I was building the SAE Baja racecar at the same time…
If anyone has any questions about mentoring in college, feel free to ask me. Feel free to message me. Also, I will be in St. Louis starting Thursday evening. Just come to 4272’s pit and ask for “Alex”. Someone there will be able to direct you.
In addition, PFP will be holding a presentation at 1:30 on Friday in room 256/6 called Active Alumni 101. This will be a presentation on various aspects of being involved in FIRST, including mentoring and volunteering at events, after high school. Come check it out and I’m sure some of you can chime in with advice and experiences to help high school seniors understand what they can do after they graduate.
Mentoring in college is great, but please don’t go back to your alumni team the year after you graduate from them. It can be tough to take on a mentor role when your friends and possible rivals are still on the team as students. Also with it being an atmosphere you are relatively comfortable with you may revert back into your student position trying to do work that should be done by the actual students. It has taken me 3 years to get comfortable with mentoring my old team, and that is primarily because the students are new, and I was never on the team with them as a student.
