Team 573 is seeking mentors

[antinos]

Hello, Summer CD! This post is a follow-up to one I made last year regarding the same subject. Unsurprisingly, life continues to pull us in many directions and thus we are continuing to seek mentors to ensure that we have support through this upcoming year and beyond.

@antinos

The Mech Warriors are looking to comprehensively grow our team as mentors’ priorities and commitments tend to shift with life changes. We are looking to ensure that we maintain our technical knowledge base along with the team’s competitive nature. Additionally, we are employing additional means of recruiting more students, and are hoping that a combined increase in headcount will enable us to parallel path much more work, progress robot development faster, and ultimately add a lot more hardware to the trophy case.

Team 573 is open to accepting mentors with any area of focus, including but not limited to:

• Programming
• Scouting and Strategy
• Mechanical Design and Systems
• Machining and Fabrication
• Electrical
• Non-engineering / Business / Administrative

The Mech Warriors are located in Bloomfield Hills, MI working out of Brother Rice High School and Marian High School since 2001. We compete in FIRST Robotics Competition during winter/spring and OCCRA* (Oakland County Competitive Robotics Association) in the fall. We remain active in the summer and other off-season periods with outreach events, projects, and team-building activities.

Since last year’s post, 573 had a great showing in OCCRA, where the students earned the first overall pick at the County Championship, competed in the semi-finals, and most importantly received the team’s second Foundation Award in three years. While our FIRST season was shorter than we anticipated, we managed to build a competitive robot, achieving an alliance captain role at both our district events and earning two Creativity Awards.

As our meetings are almost entirely in person, we are seeking mentors that are local to the Metro Detroit area. For this upcoming season, we plan to meet four days per week: Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday from 5:30-9:00pm and Saturday (timeframe TBD). Even if you only have one day per week to spare, we will be happy for you to join us!

@antinos

Why should you consider us?

• We pride ourselves in fostering an inclusive, positive, and empowering environment. We are that team that wears the skirts, and while that was the original way to ensure the girls on our team felt represented, we encourage all students to participate.
• We also foster a realistic environment. Our engineering mentors work in the automotive industry and our team’s culture and processes reflect this.
• We are planning a switch to OnShape, which we expect will improve our efficiency in developing our robots.

If you are interested, or would like more information, please feel free to PM me or @Lisa_Perez, or feel free to reach out to us via the team’s socials! We thank you for your consideration!

@antinos

*OCCRA is a low cost, student driven robotics league organized by Oakland County Schools. During OCCRA, mentors’ roles shift to ensuring the presence of a safe working environment and providing general technical knowledge when requested. Anecdotally, we tend to rotate our mentor support such that some of us support one day per week. Nevertheless, it’s still a fun competition (even as a mentor) and a great learning experience for the students!