Transitioning From Student to Mentor

FIRST General Forum
21

Sorry for the lengthiness, this was shorter in my head.

I was on a Texas team (624) for 4 years. After graduating high school, I decided to go to college in Illinois, in a town that happened to have zero FTC/FRC teams at the time. My big focuses during college were academic and a collegiate design competition (SAE Baja = design/build/compete an off-road car), but I also mentored and volunteered with FLL. After graduating, I found out a FRC team (4096) was starting in my college town. I found a niche as the primary mechanical mentor with the team. After the rookie build season, I moved 2.5 hrs away due to my job, but my heart is still with 4096, so I have continued to mentor from afar.

kwotremb and JamesCH95 have made some great points on collegiate design competitions that I will echo. It was great to be involved in other organizations that are run very differently and to continue to work with peers. From being on my Baja team and eventually captaining it, I have learned many things beyond FIRST and things that can be applied to FIRST – about corporate sponsors, holding new member interest, running a team mostly single-handed, designing with more engineering and experience, defending and explaining those designs, new skills like welding, plasma cutting, larger machine operation, and how to teach new members useful skills for themselves and the future team. FIRST gave me great skills going into SAE, and SAE gave me great skills that I put back into the SAE and FRC teams.

My advice:
Taking a 1+ year break from FRC teams is great for you! Plus you get to see how your team operates without you. I would not have developed as far as I have in both maturity and skills without stepping away from FRC. Also, take some of the things that you learned from the Flying Toasters and bring them to a team that has less (or a different culture). No matter how little you think your team has, there are teams with less!

What were some of the largest adjustments you had to make while undergoing this transition?
Doer and Thinker --> Encourager, Moderator, Interrogator (i.e. Why?)
Working with peers --> Teacher

What lessons did you learn from your first year of mentoring?
On a team with initially very little (working on more!) parent involvement, I was filling a large role on my team. Big things I learned: how to push the students to achieve more without forcing it, how to get money and material when there is little to nothing to start, that “I have an idea” is like a four letter word coming from a mentor’s mouth, you can’t do everything.

Have you tried mentoring through digital media (ex: Skype video chat, emails, etc.), and if so, how? How successful is this method?
YES. My first build season with the team was in person. Since I moved away, I have been primarily mentoring over the internet. There is no equal to mentoring in person. That has been learned the hard way after I had a Skype session with a group of students putting a hand drawing up to the camera to show me some brainstorm ideas. Long distance mentoring is mostly working out because of the number of dedicated mentors, particularly mechanical mentors, are available, and most of our team’s work and notes is on Google Drive. It is not easy to long distance mentor, even with awesome technology, and it does not give the same results.

The pros: I stay involved with students I love working with, I am able to help a lot (fill in the gaps) with some more administrative tasks that others have less time for (BOM management, CAD part drawings, training powerpoints).

The cons: I am notorious for lengthy emails no one ever reads, I didn’t meet some of the new students until competition, Skype can be poor quality sometimes, implementing ideas and presenting powerpoints is often left up to others, the students are not getting as much out of it.

What is it like suddenly belonging to a new team? Did you carry over many of the things you learned from your high school/previous team?
It is awesome (after 4 years off)! Being part of a team from the rookie year is even better. All of the former-FRC college-aged mentors involved with our team have brought a lot from a variety of different teams. Some mentors came on as freshmen and did a great job as mentors from the start, but I think they are rare and very awesome for being able to shift gears so quickly. Some mentors came on after being out of FRC for 2-6 years and are still struggling to transition to the role, some do just fine. A lot of the transition depends on you.

Who or what was your inspiration to mentor after high school?
For me personally: I had graduated with a BSME, started a grad school program I was unhappy with, and I was actually kinda lost with regards to my own life when I was contacted by an FLL mentor about helping the rookie FRC team. It made me remember why I got into engineering to begin with, and I realized I needed to drop out of grad school for my own sanity and happiness. (I made some poor decisions about my program/professor, and I may still pursue another degree in something better for me; nothing against grad school, as a whole.) Two years later, I am way happier with my decision to mentor FRC (and work) than I would’ve been with my master’s.

22

Some thoughts.

Going to college is a big transition in itself.It is critical to keep in mind that doing well in school, focusing on your classes, and achieving good grades is the most important use of your time. FIRST wants students to get scholarships, do well in school, and become positive influences in the workforce. Alumni who take on too much responsibility mentoring a FIRST team and suffer for it, hurt themselves, something nobody wants.

My son mentored as a college student, and managed to still do well, but I have seen others take on too much and as a result their college work suffered.

I think volunteering at local FTC events, which need volunteers on a Saturday, and don’t require as much travel, since there are many more FTC local venues, is a good compromise. Also, there is usually no need to spend the night in another distant city, which is hard for a student on a tight budget. Volunteering fofrFLL events may be another good option. You meet a whole new group of folks, but still those tuned into the FIRST culture.

When you are a college student, the intense build season of FRC and subsequent need to take off Thursday, Friday and Saturday for a regional, can be demanding for a student who needs to be at college classes. Also,unless the regional happens to be in the city the college is located, often requires travel.

This year, I helped 2 freshman college students (among others) to volunteer at the St Louis Championship. They worked with their college professors to get work done early, take tests before and after championship, and to get permission to go. While other FIRST participants were having fun in the evenings, they were back in their hotel rooms studying, in some cases late into the night, to be prepared for their tests when they got back. I admire their dedication as alumni to FIRST greatly, but I hope it was not too much for them. It is critical to have alumni continue to be involved, and we should all help them find the best opportunities to do so, which complement their school workload and their budget.
FIRST Alumni have many more opportunities to join other clubs after high school and this is where we lose them, some may come back, some not. But providing great volunteer and network opportunities is the key.

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In the interest of not creating a break in my FIRST record, and the fact that I still had family on the team/go to school very close by, I jumped right back as a mentor my freshmen year of college.

Whether that was the right decision or not is only for my future self to decide, but investing in those on the team who I had previously been a lead for gives me great joy. Seeing how those who were freshmen on the team and will shortly be seniors have blossomed continues to bring me back. Seeing those adults who were my mentors need to step back for health or personal reasons makes me feel the need to step up even further.

I have certainly not restricted myself to participating only in FIRST in college (nor was this true in high school), but as an organization that impacted me greater than anything else, I feel it gets priority in my life. I owe everything I am today from my LEGO League coaches, my experiences mentoring, judging, reffing, and my FRC mentors. Not paying it back when I am able just seems like a travesty.

Mentoring during college has been one of the most draining and insane things I have attempted to do. I have had some of the worst nights directly result from that time commitment. But really, it isn’t a choice I make. There is no choice, it is and always will be a part of me and it is just something I do.

24

It was mentioned already, but one thing a mentor needs to do is give every student the opportunity they should have. So, if there is “one kid” who is “weird” in some way - we all know a few on each team - you need to not ignore or avoid them, instead find a way to get through to them and make their time on the team the best it can be.

Students do not need to concern themselves with this, but mentors must.

Ah, yes: take a whole year off to do College properly. Trust Me on this.

25

I know it’s hard to take Somebody Else’s Wisdom seriously, but do try at least to hear Don’s advice.

The transition from High School to College is a whole lot more important in the long run than the one from Student to Mentor. Put your focus on being a college student. As a bonus, if you take a break from FRC for a year to get yourself settled into the new situation, you’ll probably find that it’s a whole lot easier to come back as a mentor than if you tried to keep continuity.

26

Firstly, as many have mentioned, taking a year or two off of FIRST while you are adjusting to college is a fantastic idea. This is helpful to adjust to the college atmosphere, extend your reach to other college clubs or groups, as well as identifying yourself as a mentor. If you are mentoring your old team (which it sounds like you aren’t… but someone else reading this might be), some of the students that you were on the team with won’t see you as a mentor. They will see you as a friend. This is yet another reason to take time off.

What were some of the largest adjustments you had to make while undergoing this transition?

For me, the largest adjustment I had to make was the fact that I couldn’t just jump in and do something as thoughts popped into my head. When the team needed someone in the shop to work on the robot, I couldn’t be the one to volunteer (unless there were students that wanted to be there too).

What lessons did you learn from your first year of mentoring?

The good: Mentoring is extremely rewarding. It was a pleasure to see the evolution of the students as they grew into more well rounded individuals. Students that were extremely shy came out of their shells, and students that didn’t know how to operate a screwdriver at the beginning of the season, became leaders at the competitions. This was wonderful.
The students (sometimes) honestly believe you know more than they do. Although this was scary for me at first, it made me realize (or at least think) that the students looked up to me as a role model. This means that they wanted to follow my example. I had to set a good example.

The bad: It is very hard to let the students fail, but it is very important. The students learn much more from a short term failure than they do from being told what the right direction is right off the bat. I had an issue with allowing the students to fail when I began mentoring, but as time progressed, I realized that they needed it. After a failure is where a mentor can step in and say, “Hmm, maybe there is a more [elegant/easier/plausible] solution to this problem.”
Conflict management is also difficult. Make sure you are prepared for this; I wasn’t.

**What is it like suddenly belonging to a new team? Did you carry over many of the things you learned from your high school/previous team? **

I had the pleasure, along with several other FIRST alumni, to help mold the team as it started. This probably made this transition very easy, as I felt I could bring over the good from my former team and allow for all the other mentors to do the same. Overall, the transition to a new team was natural and easy for me. All the experience I had with robot design and general FIRST experience definitely carried over and helped me guide the students in a productive direction.

Who or what was your inspiration to mentor after high school?

I immediately fell in love with FIRST as a student. This inspiration, I feel, is shared among many students in this program.

Words of "wisdom"

-When/if you become a mentor, jump in and be a leading mentor, but be sure to respect the team rules and culture.
-Mentor != Boss, and Mentor != Student. Mentor = Teacher.
-Encourage the students to get into everything they want to get into, make sure they don’t just “settle” in a niche. Just because a student shows interest in electrical systems one year does not mean that they necessarily want to be stuck there the next year.
-Although it may be hard to find time to commit sometimes, for me it was almost always worth it. The students have chosen to make this rather large time commitment, they will respect that you did as well.

Thanks for reading this gargantuan post. Hope this helps some future mentors out there.

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I think it’s great that you want to go straight into mentoring once you graduate. I have several students on my team now that are just dying to make the transition but I’ll share the same advise that I tell them:

School comes first, then robotics.

Speaking from experience, once I graduated high school, I wanted to jump right back in and mentor. Problem was I was 250+ miles away so it wasn’t easy and I was having HUGE FRC withdrawals. (So much so that a friend and I started a team here my junior year :smiley: ) The way I handled it (and still help out today with my first team) is by doing a lot of email communication and Google+ Hangouts. It keeps you in the loop, allows you to give feed back and also allows you to focus on other things such as school. Freshman year of college is not easy. Everything is new, depending on if you go away to school, your lifestyle will change. It’s best to get accustomed to school the first year then try to slowly get back in to the FRC lifestyle. If you are able to go back and help, do it on holidays or weekends when things at school aren’t stressful. The biggest mistake a mentor-student can make is since they are just removed from the student role, they want to jump back in and help. You have to remember that it’s the next set of student’s turn to experience what you did as a student.

This past season we had a student go through the student-to-mentor transition and we made it easy for him. We had enough mentors and students with previous experience that help from him wasn’t needed as much as he thought. We were glad to have him come back and help the team and it was a huge benefit for us but the last thing we would want for him is to go back and tell his parents that the reason his first year of college was so bad was because he was working with the robotics team so much, it took away from his studies. :ahh:

The transition though is tough. You just have to change your mindset. It’s ok to help out and work on somethings but remember, you’re a mentor and the mentor’s purpose is to guide the students and be of assistance.

28

First of all — sorry for the belated response! :ahh: Senior year (especially the conclusion of it) is an insanely tumultuous time, between preparing for AP exams, family obligations, scholarships, homework, and running two separate robotics events at different venues… “Free time”? I’ve forgotten what that even means!

Thank you for all of your insights. :slight_smile: I greatly value the experiences each of you have shared here, and I have considered everything stated.
Regardless, I’m conflicted at the decision on whether or not to take a break from FRC. I fully understand the rationale behind taking a year off, and I know where my priorities should lie; academia is more important. Perhaps I’ll base this decision on my performance during the first semester of college.

29

My final year as a student was rough. We knew going in that literally half of our team would be graduating, so unless a minor miracle occurred, the team would be significantly worse, at best, or die, at worst. I had been a core member, becoming the team’s field coach, rules expert, among other tasks.

The next year, I found out my team would no longer be competing in FRC 3 short weeks before the season began (I had an inkling, but it was confirmed at that time). For lack of a better phrase, I was devastated. I had not gone onto college, with my grandfather’s cancer and chemotherapy sessions coming that summer, and I was a 10 minute drive from the school.

I got a call the week before the build season began from the director of the local Boys and Girls Club, whose Robotics team was going into it’s second season. I joined, and was thrust into a role where walking in as a first year mentor, I was the mentor with the most FIRST experience. It was tough, and I put a lot of the load on myself (foolishly, I might add).

My advice? Find something. Even if you can’t find a team, volunteer. Something will find you. It’s hard and tough to make the transition, but being a student, and a very involved one at that, you have all the skills in front of you. Teach what you were taught. Show what you were shown. Hopefully, a student will be inspired like you were.

30

My story has floated around several places for years. I was a founding member (much like you) of Aces High (Team 176) in CT. My stories are oddly still as vivid as yours, and I was a team leader & MVP all 3 years in HS. However, I knew we had a strong mentor base and a great set of kids following me, so I had no doubts the team would only get better - they actually won the National (yes then it actually was only US based) Championship the year after I left!

But I digress. I had many of the same feelings others have echoed, FIRST was so big in my life that I wasn’t sure I was ready to leave it. So I made sure to look at colleges that had FIRST teams - WPI, Daniel Webster, MIT, etc. But I also applied to ones that didn’t. And along came Clarkson with their “what can we do to get you to come here” - and my answer of “let me start a FIRST team”… that sealed the deal for both of us.

And I won’t lie - I cried half the way to college. I was overwhelmed and excited, but I was scared to death of leaving my team, leaving my friends, leaving all of the comfort of the CT teams I knew and loved. So many friends were going to CT colleges and staying close to home. I was scared to be so far away. But I immersed myself in my new life, and in my back pocket, was my FIRST card - I could hold onto something I knew and use it to start something new. And I knew that in March, I would get to see all the teams & friends I knew again.

But enough of my story, I’ll answer some of the great questions you posed.

What were some of the largest adjustments you had to make while undergoing this transition?
I’ll admit, my transition was probably a bit unique. I was 300 miles from home, and over 150 miles from the closest FRC team. And I was the only person on my entire team who know what FIRST even was. In some ways this was great because it gave me a completely clean slate - I’ve said elsewhere that after 18 years and 3 teams, the Rookie Years are my favorite years. But it was tough - I had to come up with everything - all of the plans, all of the structure and all of the answers… yet I was only a year older than 1/3 of our students - and the same age as a couple of them!! I only had other college students and two teachers to help me mentor, so we all fumbled our way to a reasonably functioning robot. At times it was a struggle. I wanted to just be a college student. I needed to study, wanted to hang out with my ski team friends, but every moment I had had to be meticulously planned out and balanced so I could run the team and keep up with everything else. It was exhausting but at times exhilarating. That first year I had to fill a lot of roles - lead engineer, coach, programmer, strategist. I was used to filling a lot of roles from my high school team, but I was used to having a lot of mentors & other students with just as much experience to bounce ideas off of. It was a whole new world.

What lessons did you learn from your first year of mentoring?

  • Learn when GOOD IS GOOD ENOUGH. I was a perfectionist in high school. I quickly learned that when juggling a million things, sometimes you have to give up some of that perfectionism and look at your (and the team’s) overall goal to determine priorities.
  • HAVE/GET A LIFE. As much as I say I struggled to fit it all in, the time management skills I gained by trying to have a life outside of FIRST were incredibly valuable, as was the opportunity to have a life outside of FIRST. I had completely separate friends, I was involved in a varsity sport, I had study groups, I was in the honors program. Do stuff OTHER than FIRST, even if it means sacrificing some of your time in FIRST.
  • I DONT KNOW is an acceptable answer. Especially if you aren’t working with the same team, the change from student to mentor can be more abrupt, and people can expect you to have the answers. Its ok to not know… but then everyone needs to work harder to figure out what the answer is (you included!).
  • THIS ISNT YOUR HS TEAM. No matter how hard you try, even with a clean slate, you can never recreate what you had in your old team. You need to learn the new team structure, learn what this new team needs and adapt to it. You can’t spend your entire time trying to make it “what you had” or you will just be running into a brick wall.
  • FOCUS ON SCHOOL. Other’s have said it, plenty have suggested a year off (which I agree, but am not a good example of). My grades slipped my sophomore year as I struggled to balance it all, and balance the growth of a second year team… and it was a fight for me to get my GPA back up to a 3.3 on graduation. I even ended up taking my senior year off from FIRST. Its ok to take time off - FIRST will be here when you get back :slight_smile:

Have you tried mentoring through digital media (ex: Skype video chat, emails, etc.), and if so, how? How successful is this method?
I did this after leaving my 3rd team and moving out here to Boston. I returned every other weekend in build season (making the near 400mile drive out there), and obsessively keeping up with their blog, online wiki, webcasts, emails, etc. It can be done… but honestly, its super exhausting and sometimes incredibly frustrating and guilt-enducing. You want to be there to help, you may see mistakes happening or coming and you wonder if you were there if it would have been different. You wonder why certain decisions were made rather than others, and you constantly second guess things. But that team needs to be it’s own team, those students & mentors need to learn their own ways of doing things. It can no longer be “your way”.
Don’t get me wrong, distance mentoring can be done, and it can be easier than ripping off the bandaid… but I would HIGHLY encourage you to pick one or the other. Turn to your old team for questions if you need it, but don’t try and mentor/work with both. Its too much. Especially for your freshman year. And sometime change is good. Joining a new team will help you shift your focus, and maybe allow you to feel less guilty about focusing on college.

**What is it like suddenly belonging to a new team? Did you carry over many of the things you learned from your high school/previous team? **
I was lucky enough to start with a clean slate for each of the two teams I founded after my high school team. This meant I could take all of the lessons I learned (both teams do patron drives - just like my HS team, the most recent runs a preship scrimmage like my HS team, structures were updated versions, etc) and modify them to fit the new teams - to take the best of what they had and the best of the other teams I knew and make a new team. But in joining an existing team, I am sure that you have a lot more existing culture to deal with, and while you may be able to incorporate some of the “best” things you’ve learned, and certainly can use mentoring styles you know, you won’t be able to go in and make this team like your old team. So bring what you know, but don’t spend all your time trying to make it your old team.

Who or what was your inspiration to mentor after high school?
Three of my mentors in high school - our team leader Dave, the first engineer I worked with to build an amazing self powered goal blocking device - Tom, and a crazy electrical engineer - Rob. They were amazing mentors, and the reason that I became an engineer. They each shaped me into who I am as a mentor. I decided my dream was to inspire just one student the way I had been inspired, and if I could do that, I could carry on what they gave me.

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Wisdom (above)! The first year in college is critical, especially so in tough majors (EE/ME/ChemE/Physics etc). If you screw up that first year it is a long uphill climb to pull your GPA up. Help out during your winter break, spring break and in the off season (summer) but don’t compromise your education. It is more important to set an example of success at the university level to the secondary school team members.