Just doing a quick poll. Something I notice a little bit from the team I’m on and have heard from other teams is a split in the team. It seems many times that the PR Team and the Robot Sided Teams are split from each other. Many times, people working on Award Presentations and Video/ Audio Stuff want next to nothing to do with the Robot side of the team and vice verses. There are a few outgoing team members that do both sides and sort of are the “glue” between the two sides. Our team gets along well and nobody really makes fun of the other. It’s just I’ve noticed a split of interest many times.
Does anyone else notice this split in their team between the PR side and the Robot side of the team. Do you notice any other type of split in your team? Thanks.
We had this split until this year when I became captain. Its not that any previous captains simply didn’t care about this issue it was just they were all on one side.
I have always done both. I love graphic design, Marketing, and outreach. In fact that is what I want to do with my life. However, I gravitated my Sophomore year to the engineering side. Because I understood both sides I could lead both sides and make them work better together.
Based on that I think having team leaders, whether students or mentors try both tasks will allow them to better join the subgroups together.
It’s always been that way for us, I think. Rookies are required to choose an “Operations” division to participate in and an “Engineering” division to participate in. However, members tend to split into one or the other within a few months.
I heard from a distinguished member of a Hall of Fame team that every week during build season, the Awards Team gives their current iteration of the Chairman’s Presentation to the entire team. This technique added to the team solidarity and gave each member buy-in to the Chairman’s process since they could give feedback and advice.
Something we’ll be trying this year is the subteam leaders will write the robot-specific award submissions (innovation in controls, industrial design, etc.) then submit to the PR team for editing. Hopefully this will increase conversations between the subteam members and make a more holistic approach to the team.
We make a really concerted effort to spotlight all aspects of our team to make sure we’re well integrated. We do design reviews and we do chairman’s presentation reviews with the team so everyone gets to see what’s going on and has the chance to ask questions and offer ideas for improvement.
While we have defined sub-teams for our robot systems, media, outreach, and awards submissions, the lines are fluid and students are encouraged to try different things. We’ve had people start out working on the robot their freshman year and end up leading the non-engineering side by the time they’re seniors. We conversely have had team outreach members go on to lead the robot design as seniors.
Is there a division? Yes. Specialization does that, because most people need a focus to become the best at what they do, but our different sub-teams have developed a mutual respect that really helps us function as a whole.
All that being said, every team is different. What works for one team won’t always work for another team.
We’ve definitely had this in the past. We’ve worked to get rid of it, partially because it creates a bit of unnecessary us vs them within the team, but mostly because it was such a strong gender split; the business side was entirely girls. While there were several girls on the “robot” side, boys who wanted to do PR would have had a rough time of it, both from the girls and the other boys. We now require everybody to do some of both.
Back when we started the team, I feel like the rift between robot and non-robot operations was less pronounced initially; because we were a very small group in the beginning, many of us had no choice but to jump from PR to robot, and back again. I know that even I built part of our 2011 chassis and hand-fabricated a couple of the wheels, and I became solely PR in the following seasons. As we grew, and as we became eligible for Chairman’s, the divide began to grow. By 2013, my final year as a student, that division of sides was quite pronounced. There was the robot group, the e-board, and everyone else. Most of the e-board constituted the “everybody else” group, so the robot-builders were almost their own little island. That being said, we always tried to ensure that everybody had a basic understanding of both aspects, particularly those in the pit crew so that no question asked by a judge would ever come as a surprise. Once we won Chairman’s at Gull Lake in 2013, there was this shift in attitude from the robot group toward the rest of us. There was never a sense of us having been looked down upon by them, but they certainly gained a newfound respect for what we did. We became more valuable. That’s when the gap began to close again.
Now, the team has implemented mandatory training sessions for all students that cover every aspect of the team. If you don’t have all the training sessions checked off as complete, you can’t go to competition. And that includes both robot and PR related content. This is done with the intention of giving everyone a taste for both, not only to diversify each member’s experience, but to further integrate the two “halves” of the team into one.
A toaster may have two (or sometimes four) separate slots, but it’s still one whole toaster!
In the past, that’s happened for us. What we needed was a culture change.
Recently, we’ve actually required that students who plan on traveling are a part of both a technical subteam and fundraising/outreach work. They still prioritize one thing, and are required a minimum amount of hours in their main subteam - but they also need to meet a (less strenuous) hour count while involved with another facet of the team to qualify for the trips with us.
It sounds a little out there to ‘make’ them do it, but what it’s actually turned into is that a passion has developed by all our kids, for both ‘sides’ of being on the team. Even if they’re not super excited about it, they at least have the knowledge of what’s going on, and respect for all the work that goes into it.
It’s worked for us - may not work for all teams. Just $0.02
Can’t say there’s a “split” in my team, but more of a gradient or a spectrum. I don’t recall any students being in one or the other, and I don’t recall any students devoting all their time to one or the other. This is why my answer is “no.”
I think the reason for this is because each student on 701 is appointed a particular committee related to the robot’s construction (Design, Mechanical, Programming, and/or Electrical). Some students may participate in more than one committee per season. Anyone who does public relations will be a part of a robot committee, including those in leadership positions on the team. Even some of those who do lots of work in leadership, outreach, or award projects participate in more than one robot building committee.
At the beginning of the year in the fall, every student has to pass an exam/project that tests them on the basics of the robot construction committees listed above.
Sure, there are students whose major job may be PR, but they’re still contributing a major portion of their build season on robot construction in their respective committee on 701.
I do have to say, however, that there may be a slight separation between these construction committees themselves. Design and Mechanical work together very closely, and Programming and Electrical work together very closely, so there’s the only divide that I can really vouch for as existent. It’s really only until we need to assemble a full robot at the end of the season when they all come together. I remember as a student being in the Mechanical and Design committees and hardly ever seeing the Programming and Electrical students, but whenever I walked in the Electrical committee room, sure enough, there’d be a few programmers working in there testing code with the hardware when they’re not in the Programming committee room writing code.
On our team it’s called the PAW team (Promotions. Animation. Web is now Promotions. App Design. Web). When we were at our old site on Mustard Street it was known as The Dungeon because the students occupied a room separate from the rest of the team in the shop and had nothing at all to do with the robot design. A couple of site changes later and the PAW team still has nothing at all to do with the robot and thus feels disconnected from that part of the team.
Ours feels separate but they still work with the robots and Engineering team. Our Products team helps implement some design decisions on the robot (like last year our status light was inside a lantern-esque thing) and they design the pit. Our Communications team is social media, which means they’re always around them taking pictures and basically marketing our engineering team.
Our Business team on the other hand DOES feels separate from everyone else. We lock ourselves up in a room and make phone calls and emails. Only interaction is when we get bugged sometimes for “moar money.”
