Now this is something that I’ve been thinking of tonite…
What’s your mentor makeup?
As in, what do the mentors on your team do when they’re not helping out the team? Are they all engineers or faculty…or are there other professions floating around that we’re not aware of?
I’m particulary interested in hearing from the teams funded primarily by one company - are your recruiting efforts for mentors within the company limited to the engineering & development departments, or do you have a wide variety of specialties? And for the faculty, is it primarily science & technology teachers, or do you actively recruit teachers from all over the school?
Note: Yes, this could also fit in the Career forum, but Team Organization also works, so thus here it stays.
In our first year we had more or less three main mentors: The engineer parents of the student who founded the club and a friend of theirs who works at a machine shop. There were a few parents that put in time but the majority of the planning and body work that was by students and the three mentors. This year those three were back as well as more parents: an engineer and network admin, plus the team’s founder and I who are college students.
Also, our sponsor, [plug] Modern Industries [/plug], is the company our machine shop mentor works for. At first they donated us shop time and materials, but after we did well at regionals they gave us lots and lots of money to go to Atlanta. It was amazing. Also, our founding engineer father donates money to the team and its matched by his company.
We don’t actively recruit adults for help and money. So far they’ve all come to us, and our team’s depended on their generosity.
All of our mentors are students at Purdue University (which is kind of like a company). There are usually about 40 of us from all different schools, but around half of us are in engineering. About eight of us are actually involved in creation of the robot and a bunch are devoted to Lego League. When we are not helping out the team, we are either 1. Studying like crazy or 2. On summer vacation.
Right now we have two high school faculty members. One is the technology teacher and the other is a chemistry teacher. We have a few professors that serve only as an administrative connection to the university and run the advisor class (ME 497f, one non-technical credit). We have no practicing engineers or mentors from industry. It seems to work for us.
All most all of 862 mentors work for our main sponsor Visteon. Most of them are engineers but this year we did pick up a few new mentors who were in programming. We also have a few who are management. And of course we have our teacher who has been with the team since the team started.(He’s one of the electronics teachers at P-CEP) As far as helping with the robot our team is pround to say the robot is mostly student built. The mentors help with teaching students how to machining the parts, and for safety reasonsstudents were not allowed to weld so the mentors had to weld the frame.
We have around 5mentors form outside of school and 2 teachers from school. The ones from outside of school come places like JPL, NASA, Boeing, and an aerospace company called Robert’s Tool. The teachers are the machine shop teacher and the CAD teacher.
We have something around 10 engineers (at least two of which are team alumni) , but at any given time theres usually around six working with us. We also have four teachers from our school, two in the tech ed department who work on the robot and design with the rest of the team, an english teacher who helps us handle awards stuff, and a french teacher who handles a lot of the organization of trips, etc.
Our team has 3 mentors, none of which are professional engineers. Our Fearless Leader, Mr. Ballou, is the Art/Theather Tech teacher at our school. He is an engineer by training.
Mr. Applegate is the Physics teacher. I think his training is in chemistry.
Mr. Nette is the father of one of our members, and I honestly have no idea what his engineering background is.
An alumni of our school, and friend of mine, might be taking a year off from MIT, in which case we might get our first student mentor.
Frankly, I’m glad we don’t have tons of engineers as many teams do, as they might become too involved in the robot and suck away our fun
One works for SCE&G, the local power company. The other works for PBR Automotive…they do brakes. They also are known for giving rookie teams comprised of three schools (two of which are rivals) $1000 checks.
We’ve usually had somewhere around 6 to 7 engineers from Johnson & Johnson helping us out. Usually about 3 of them worked on the robot, and the other 3 helped out with administrative stuff. We do have 2 teacher advisors, but they’re not too involved (unfortunately), so the J&J administrative people have usually picked up the slack.
However, this year, J&J has told us that they no longer want to be involved with any kind of administrative duties on the team. So, we’ve got a strong parent group going right now that should be able to pick up all of that for next year. So, as of right now, we’re looking to have about 3 J&J engineers & 2 parents helping build the actual robot. And then on top of that about 2 parents helping with administrative duties
Last year Northeastern paid for machinists to work in our lab, that was cool. This year Norteastern got us someone who is a Doctorete candidate, who teaches at Northeastern and also works on both administrative and engineering aspects on the team.
Our 1 random volunteer lived in Boston and bought a Segway. He found out about our team by going to the kickoff, which apparently also had a Segway party. He’s been visiting the lab frequently ever since.
Our mentors’ occupations are diverse, which is a reflection of our team!
engineers
electronics technician (retired)
machinist
professor of neurobiology
teachers (K-12)
plumbing contractor
electrical contractor
web site coordinator
laboratory researcher
computer programmer
account manager
administrative assistants
college students (accounting/finance and social work majors)
I’m sure there are others that I have missed, but these are the ones that come to mind at the moment!
We enjoy a nice mixture of parent and sponsor engineers.
Not too many of our mentors wear makeup.
(Most of the engineers are managers. We’re lucky if we remember how to do real work, but boy can we fill out the paperwork!)
We have one primary sponsor – FESTO
The mixture of FESTO engineers has changed over the years. The original company volunteers are still involved, but have moved on to other positions/depts within the company, primarily R&D, business & marketing, but they still have control of machine shops. We need to reengage the current engineering department.
(2) ME/pneumatics
(1) Marketing (okay, okay he’s an ME too)
(1) Machinist
Parents (and other relatives) supply:
(1) Welder (runs his own shop)
(1) CS (Northrop Grumman)
(2) EE/techs (MRI company, AIL)
(4) science teachers (faculty) (we’re trying to recruit technology, computer, business teachers as well)
(1) school administrator
(lots) of other parents covering fundraising, travel, administration
These parents tend to be the community volunteers - school board president, PTA presidents, Boy & Girl Scout leaders, etc.
One parent works for a deli, so that’s where our weekend food supply gets donated from.
One parent supplies the team shirts from their company
One parent owns an automotive shop.
It can be hardest on the parents who own small businesses to donate time.
Interestly enough my second Team has no mentors from the primary sponsor, but has:
(4) Northrop Grumman engineers (one of them a parent)
(1) Jet engine mechanic
(3) really involved parents handling administration, etc.
(1) shop teacher (faculty)
We need to engage more school faculty & administrators
We need to engage more school faculty & administrators
We need to reengage the current engineering department.
We are also trying to think of ways to engage engineers from our primary sponsor. At least one of our engineers used to work for our sponsor and is now working at another division of the corporation. Our machinist and technician are both retired from the sponsor. I am on the team as a parent/adult mentor but worked for the sponsor for 25 years before being laid off. So we have no current employees of the sponsor actively working with the team.
These parents tend to be the community volunteers - school board president, PTA presidents, Boy & Girl Scout leaders, etc.
What’s the saying? If you want a job done, ask the person who has the least amount of time! Seriously, my husband and I live by the tenet that you have to “give back” to the community in which you work and live. Between us we have volunteered as a firefighter, EMT, Rescue Squad Leader, K-9 Search and Rescue handler, PTO President, professional clown, costume designer for YMCA summer theater productions, Sunday School teacher, etc. etc. And now as FIRST adult mentors. I have to say that this is the most rewarding work when I see how much of an impact FIRST makes on the students.
As far as the robot goes, our mentors consist of a machinist, and an auto mechanic who runs his own garage, and lets us use the shop. For “machining” we have a belt sander, a jigsaw, a table top drill press, and at about week 4, the mentors bought us a table top bandsaw. These guys are great, they donate tons of time, and money, and always let us kids do the work; which I find to be really awesome. They let us know when they think something is going to go awry, but for the most part we learn the lessons ourselves, and we all seem to be happy with the system, I know I am anyway. And the sysetm does seem to work, this was our rookie year and including the Championship event we ended the season with 5 trophies, and Rookie All-star for our regional.
I’ve seen the threads which talk about how the purpose of FIRST is to inspire kids to get into engineering, not neccesarily, have the kids engineering the robot. I have to disagree, how can an outsider ever truly get a taste for whats required of something like this?
I don’t know how other people feel, but personally being on a rookie team, I wasn’t even thinking about the competition, seeing our team work together to create such a beautiful machine was a reward in itself. Competing, and competing in a manner that I would call succesful was just a bonus. (And maybe a way to justify missing 2 weeks of class, to see the rest of your robots )
We also have a very “diverse” group on our robotics team. Out school is situated on the campus of UCSD, so we have a couple of college students too.
School:
2 teachers that to PR
1 teacher that helps with robot
Mechanical:
1 student from UCSD
2 engineers from Naval Systems & Warfare
Electrical:
1 engineer
Programming:
2 engineers, 1 student from UCSD
That brings the total to 5 engineers, 2 UCSD students, 1 teacher for people that help us on the robot
Machine Shop and Welding:
We found a local machine shop to let us use mostly the manual tools in their shops, and we’ve made a friendship with a local metal artist to do our welding.
More specifically we have:
3 mechanical engineers
2 chemical engineers
1 electrical engineer
1 management, works as a test engineer
1 financial, only non-teacher mentor who does not work for the UTC Fuel Cells/UTC Power
4 teachers, 2 tech ed, 1 english, and 1 French I believe.
Edit- I forgot to list our two of most important mentors
1 Fuel cell mechanic (that’s his real job title), our team scrounger if you need it he will find it or figure out where to get
1 Fuel cell inspector/certified welder, he’s the one who welded our frame and it’s intergral accumulator for our vacuum system.
We have around five mentors from Stanford but they really only run workshops on the basics of robotics. I’m proud to say our robot is 100% student built, machined, programmed and run! Thanks to all you mentors out there for devoting your time and energy to spread your expertise to the next generation of engineers.
1 Physics Teacher
1 District Administrator (Info Services Director)
3-5 Parents
2 of those parents happen to be a Physicist and an Engineering Professor.
The 1 lonely teacher takes on 95% of organizing and planning it all - which leaves the funnest 5% to the other mentors that is helping students design and build the gosh darn robot.
Sincerely,
the lonely teacher…
*** Has anyone else noticed the reluctance of science and math teachers to join the team - after 4 years - not one other teacher at our school want’s anything to do with us… Hmmm?? Don’t get me wrong, they support the students and love what we’re doing but…
We have two main mentors who work as engeneers for Microvision , and a few alumni of the robotics club, and of couse our old CEO and founder RyanMcE. We also have our physics teacher helping out, but he acts more like a chaporone than a mentor. We also have a parent volenteer to take care of the financial aspects of the club. We also have our common sense, which is definatly a great mentor.
