so which is better in your own opinion…
if you are a student on the robotics team and your team wins a regional, an award, or even championship match…
or if you WERE a student on the team, graduated from HS, came back to mentor, and youre team wins a regional/award/championship…
and if this has happened to you, what are your feelings on it? is it more rewarding or exciting as it mightve been if you were a student on the team?
Definatly student, because if you win something, then you are one of the direct producers of what won the award. You have more ownership over it, and thus more pride in what you did. If your a mentor and your team wins something, you are more proud of the students, because it was them that designed and built the robot. You just provided asistance and other forms of support along the way.
In a phrase: both, they’re just different
When you’re a student, the magic of FIRST is the scene and the people and the grandeur and the awards and the robots and the everything. Winning an award for your efforts puts you on cloud 9.
When you’re a mentor, the happy parts are watching your students experience that, and other life successes even after they graduate. Yes, the winning and performing well is cool, but the best part as a mentor, at least to me, is seeing my kids (they hate it when I call them that) enjoying themselves and doing well.
(I was a student on HOT for 2 years and have been a mentor on the Desperate Penguins for the last 5)
Interesting thread topic BTW…
yea well i was thinking about it… bc as a senior all the things you want to accomplish before your out of HS and then you get so close yet in the end its cut short…
plus our school is fairly new to FIRST… only our second year. so i guess we still have room to grow and as a possible mentor, ill be able to share with them my experiences and help them grow…
I agree with Beth, mentoring is a whole new ball of wax. As a student I saw awards in regard to my personal accomplishment. Being a mentor gives you a wider view of the team’s accomplishment not just individual’s.
It is a bit more sentimental when you mentor the team you were a part of as a student, I guess… (2 years student / 4 years mentor 955)
This year the team I am a alum and mentor of won the Industrial Design award. As a mentor it means a lot knowing you showed the students a very loose concept of a robot and got to watch the students evolve it into an award winning design.
I can say that it feels good knowing the founding members (my self included) hard work has laid a foundation for a team that assuming we retain the same level of parent and teacher involvement we have now, will rarely have a bad year. In prior years/teams those same founding members had been through a lot of bad robots, organization and horrific school politics. Hopefully, the students on the team now will never have to see or be part of that kind of un-fun and un-FIRST like experience.
So in general I would have to say its just different.
I don’t have the perspective of being a mentor (yet!), but I will share what I can:
The best feeling I’ve had in my time in FIRST was when I realized that I, as a driver, had had a significant role in making us the third seeded team at the Pittsburgh regional.
Overall, I think our students had the “jumping for joy, flying high in the sky” kind of joy, as well as our coach (he was terribly excited when we won a match which seemed heavily weighted to the other alliance, as well as when we had the highest scoring match at the regional), whereas our mentors have more of a look of appreciate, satisfaction and awe.
Success is success. Every time any of my teams has met with a big success, student and mentor alike light up with excitement. (Now, what we call a “big success” is a situational thing…but the point remains.)
They are very differently, but I am inclined to say that both is equally good.
As a student, you have been working incredibly hard for between several months and several years with other team members to achieve many common goals. Teamwork is often tough, especially in high school. Building a successful robot is pretty tough. Getting some kids excited about things like FIRST is also pretty tough. No matter how small the success is, whether it’s just shipping a robot, maybe winning a match, winning an award making some kids smile, having fun with your team, winning a regional or the Championship Chairman’s… on any level, this success validates all of your efforts and brings an incredible level of joy.
As a mentor or anyone who has worked with members of the current winning team (this includes some that may be better classified as alumni because they worked with them in the recent past), you get a very different but equally joyous feeling when your team receives an award. You have watched these students learn and grow for between several months and several years. You have guided them through the process, seen every step of the way including all their struggles and the hardest moments, and now you can see them at their peak. Knowing that your students are happy and have learned valuable lessons through all of your time is also a wonderful feeling.
So, from either perspective having your work validated, in some way, either in the form of an award or a self-realization, is a very happy moment for all parties involved. The emotions may not be exactly the same, but I don’t think they can be compared or one can be quantified as greater than the other.
I too have experienced this. I have been with my team, 1629 (GaCo) for five years, three as a mentor and two as a student. We won the Chesapeake regional when I senior and on the drive team. Everyone was telling me great job and the students got the attention and praise.
Since then my team has been considerable more successful winning the engineering inspiration award two years in a row and playing and placing well as regionals and championships. While the feeling of excitement is the same it’s for a different reason. It’s just not because you won, it’s because the students won and achieved their goals. As a mentor, it’s you saying great job. I would much rather give praise than receive it.
omg…great topic. But I feel the exact same way, I had high expectations this year (slightly my fault) and was dissapointed when we didn’t do as well as I had hoped, and now my FIRST experience as a student is gone. After thinking about this the week after my last regional, I came to a conclusion that my team (Team 1403, Cougar Robotics) made me who I am and FIRST’s values are my values. Therefore, what I do as a student or a mentor is for my team and a team victory would be a victory of my own. Of course, eventually when I’m a mentor I will be proud of the work the students have done, like now I am proud of all that my younger teammates have accomplished and what I know they will accomplish in the future.
I’m really sad that I’ll be going away however, the team has been like a second family to me, all the mentors teammates and even some of the parents. I guess the time comes when I have to start another FIRST team…
yea thats what i like about FIRST…it makes you want to keep on improving and doing better…and in the process you learn a whole new set of values that you can take anywhere and for sure it’ll make it easier to succeed in whatever you intend to do…
it doesnt matter whether you win or lose.
being the first FIRST team for my school is pretty epic. so in a way its rewarding to know that if in later years my team reaches any form of success, its rewarding to know that you helped and shared in setting the foundation for the new kids to build on… and the only way to go is up.
yea thats true too…
it’s impossible to compare the two
both are good, yet so different…
i just wish as a senior, it wouldve been in my time that we had something successful.
but as we always say…
“next year” haha
Definitely the mentor.
If your a student, your proud because you helped build an award winning robot. If your a mentor, your proud because you helped build an award winning team. Don’t get me wrong. I loved building the robots and still love an engineering challenge, but building a person’s future is so much more rewarding.
Note: I in know way believe that I am responsible for a student’s success. Their success is their success. I am just happy to be there and teach them anything and everything I can. A year where the students learn a lot and win nothing is more rewarding than a year where the team does well and doesn’t learn much.
i like that! that just might be my memorable saying from now on…
I think that the feeling of joy you get after winning an award is based not on your position on the team, but rather the number of hours and the amount of passion you put into the 'bot. The more effort you put in the better you feel about it being validated, which does lean it towards students because they get the chance to do the work, while mentors just help. But in the end, if you work hard, no matter what part of the team you are, it will feel great.
haha…that’s what we said last year and what we said this year. We will get it though.
This topic is great for me, since I’m a senior too.
What everyone said is right, and I’ll repeat it.
As a student, you enjoy the success of the team by knowning that you’ve accomplished this and that in order to help the rest of the team win the award/the competition.
As a driver at my first year in FIRST, reaching as high as the Semi-Finals, I felt very satisfied with what me and my team have accomplished.
The feeling that you have as a student is uniqe and is only 3 times in a life time (for FRC, being from Sophomores to Seniors).
Now that I think of it retrospectivly, in 2008 I was the driver again, and once again our team had failed in the Semi-Finals, but this time I wasn’t happy at all. I actually cried.
And I might say that I had a reason to cry, since in my team the project is mendatory for 2 years and the third year as a Senior is voluntary and is counted more or less as young mentoring. And indeed I had cried since I understood that I wouldn’t have much to have to do on the robot for the next season, to say that it was THAT significant to the team’s victory.
The past two years in our team weren’t the most successful and only this year we had a great team of siriously dedicated students and mentors, and that is probably one of the reasons why we had a good robot and strategy for the Israeli regional and have won it, and I’m not sure I can say that this year’s success has a big part of it because of me, for several reasons.
My first goal in joining FIRST was to practice working in a business-like group, as a programmer, trying to build a prototype in a short time, in team work, and I believe that teamwork was very hard to be done in the past two years. I am not sure I have entierly been able to succeed in working in team work for the past three years for several reasons.
But I understood that I and any other Senior graduating HS should understand that life moves on. We had FIRST to learn our lessons for the future, for the exact things that we are about to come in to really soon.
That is why we should try to accomplish those goals we haven’t entirly been able to succeed in FIRST, or haven’t felt satisfied with the results. Find a good job with co-workers you find that you can work with, in team work and cooperation. Find the right way that works for you and your company to work to accomplish the companies goals, like in FIRST where you’d try to find the right goals that would fit your school, your sponsors, your parents and yourselves, the students. Work hard to have your company beat the rest of the competition in the market, just like you’d work hard to have your robot be better than other teams.
Continuing as a mentor probably has a slight diffrence from being a student, but not too much. I think that any senior should keep being active in FIRST as a mentor, since you keep learning more lessons from what the team does and how the team has done to accomplish what you’ve told them to do, to see if you were right.
Like I’ve said before, life moves on, and so should you. You’ve tried your best, but not always what you want actually happens. But you should at least feel good with yourself that you’ve tried your best to accomplish as much as possible while you were a student.
I know that I, as a programming team leader, a team CEO, a strategy team leader, a driver, a coach and an FLL mentor, have accomplished atleast the minmum of all I needed to have from FIRST.
Winning the regional, and having the chance to be in Atlanta, to compete and meeting the other famous teams is just a bonus. Though a rewarding one. I’m really for the idea that every FIRST team should have thier opportunity to experience the exictment going on in the crowd when the Einstien games begin.
If missing the field is the problem for you, don’t forget that mentors can be commanders/coaches. 
Yet I might be wrong.
Being a student is definitely more fun.
I was a student on Team Voltage for four years, and now I’m back as a mentor. Voltage has a program called “Mentors-in-training” and that’s basically created for college students that want to mentor. We do this because the team wants to be able to monitor college student’s grades to ensure they’re not slipping or become overly dedicated. I’m one such person…
anyways…
The whole experience has made me a 100% better person and totally changed me (as cliche as that may sound). When I started FIRST I wasn’t a good student, I wasn’t motivated, and I knew what I wanted to do but didn’t know anything about how to achieve the goals.
All of that is great but there’s still one experience that was the culmination of it all…
When I was a student we won our first ever Championship award for controls in 2007; I was one of the people that got to sit in the awards section to go get it. I will never ever forget when the CEO of Rockwell Automation said “This team makes control look easy…” One of the reasons we got the award (not undercutting the team, EVERYONE has a hand in our robots) was because of our amazing software that had an awesome autonomous that could react no matter what the orientation of the rack and it made control for the drivers really easy (hence the easy button that would score automatically). I was the only person on the software team that year; the mentor that taught me and I are now good friends, the whole experience was just AWESOME.
You don’t get those experiences as a mentor, however, you DO get to help the students that are younger than you build the pieces to have those experiences. It’s very rewarding but in a different way.
–Chris Struttmann
Voltage386 (Charge UP!)