Sara -
May I suggest that you might want to think about this a little differently? Don’t think of the UFH nomination process (and other awards, particularly the WFA), as open only to those that have been with the program for 147 years, worked with 2,398 teams, volunteered at 312 events, and have their entire home decorated with FIRST memorabilia. To me, the perfect UFH is someone that may do things “on a smaller scale” but does them in an incredibly effective or personal manner.
Consider these two options. First, you have some executive who has enough authority that with just five minutes of effort they can get their multi-bazillion-dollar organization to write a check to FIRST (for a huge amount to FIRST, but 0.00023% of the company’s gross annual budget). Second, you have the dedicated engineer or teacher that pours their soul into reaching just that one student on the team that really needs to be inspired. While I recognize the value of the contributions of the former, I am much more impressed by, and appreciative of, the deeds of the latter.
We have all seen it happen. Every team seems to have at least one of “those” students. You know - the one with no social skills, the perpetual outcast, the one who has never dealt with an adult as a peer, who spends most of the time sitting around just waiting for the team meeting to be over. But then that one mentor finds a way to break through and show that they really do give a crap, and everything changes.
Sometimes the mentor is just the first one in a long time to talk to them like a grown-up without being demeaning or condescending. Or maybe they just ask “hey, would you help me with this for a minute” and that is enough to get them to start to understand “I can do this too!” Or maybe the mentor assigns a significant responsibility to a student that doesn’t know they are ready for it yet, and let’s them learn their capabilities through a forced experience. Or just offers a few life lessons about why certain things happen, against the backdrop of working on a robot. Or sometimes it may take six months of constant bad jokes, shared junk food, and talk about old muscle cars and hair bands to gain a little respect. But all of a sudden two years have passed, and that student is now the captain of the team and is coming to the mentor to say “you know, that one kid over there really needs some help…”
A great mentor guides without giving the answers, teaches through discovery, demonstrates without lecturing, provides support from backstage, observes without hovering, and leads by example. If you can find someone that can do this successfully with even one or two students a year, then you have a mentor of heroic proportions.
A good engineer can calculate Fast Fourier Transforms on a table napkin, or have the kinematic singularity probability in joint-space for a R-P-R-R-P-R-Y manipulator memorized, or know that the velocity of sound on Mars is 260m/sec. But a mentor will help you discover that finding the answers to silly things like that can be its’ own reward, while in the background simultaneously filling out the paperwork required to keep the team running. That is what being a great mentor is all about. And those are the sorts of people that you should be nominating for UFH.
-dave