T-SQL Tuesday 184 - Mentorship

T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party hosted by a different community member each month. This month, Deborah Melkin (blog) asks us to talk about our relationship with mentoring and sponsorship.

This can include:

• What does mentoring and sponsorship mean to you? What value do you see in mentoring and sponsoring?
• How have you benefited from mentorship and sponsors?
• What has worked for you in making these relationships successful?
• On the flip side, what obstacles have you had to work through?
• What do you do to sponsor others in the community?
• As March is Women’s Month, I’d also like to add: How are you mentoring and sponsoring women and other underrepresented groups in our community?

Read the rest of the invitation, where Deborah expands upon the question.

While T-SQL Tuesday is generally focused on data and the data community, I’m taking a bit of a diversion here and I apologize in advance for rambling.

For the past several years, I have been a mentor for our local school’s FIRST program. My involvement has roughly tracked with my kids’ participation in the various programs starting in elementary school, but due to my work schedule I wasn’t able to participate as much as I wanted to for the first few years. With COVID-19 sending me into permanent work from home, things suddenly opened up and I’ve been up to my neck in it for the past 5 years.

The pinnacle of FIRST’s programs is FIRST Robotics Competition, or FRC. High school-age students all over the world are given a new challenge (game) the first Saturday of the year, and have 2-3 months to develop a nearly 150 pound robot to play the game on a field with 5 other robots. Perform well enough at one of the dozens of regional and district competitions and you punch a ticket to compete against the best teams in the world at the World Championship in mid-April.

Coincidentally, this post goes live the week of our first competition of the 2025 season.

This has become a family activity. Both my son and daughter (they’re in high school) mentor/coach middle school FIRST LEGO League teams. My wife fell into mentoring both LEGO and FRC teams as well. For 6 months of the year, our lives revolve around either LEGO or “big” robotics.

Some FIRST mentors have specialties - mechanical, programming, electrical, game day strategy, etc. I’ve found my niche in not having a niche; when people ask what I do on the team, I tell them “I’m whatever the team needs me to be.” This means that through the course of the season, I might be engaged in any of the following (and this isn’t a complete list):

• Helping with wiring
• Editing documentation and sponsorship letters (explaining my reasoning as we go)
• 3D printing
• Scouring the internet for components and/or their data sheets
• Consulting on design elements
• Being an emotional support human
• Being a pack mule
• Making sure everyone is staying safe
• Organizing meals (fun fact: teenagers like food)
• Advising on presentation skills
• Taking photos
• Cleaning up the shop
• Herding cats

Mentors come from all over our local community. Some are FIRST alumni (I am), others are parents of current or past students. We bring our technical, professional, and life experience to the students on the team. Some need a lot of guidance throughout their limited years on the team. Some need very little. And others just a nudge need to find their niche and they’re off and running. The trick is to help them find that niche, give them space when they need it, and the right kind of help when called for.

To Deborah’s point about women and underrepresented groups - we have a fair number of young women and trans or non-binary team members, and that’s been true since I’ve been with the team. We give every student a chance to work on everything, if they choose. Sometimes we’ll put a tool in someone’s hand and saying “you should try this, just to say you did it.” Early in the season, another mentor yelled “ok, you’re learning how to wire Molex connectors today!” across the room to my daughter and she’s been the go-to student for that ever since (she rolls her eyes every time I call her a “Molexpert”). When the occasion calls for it, we also find ourselves in tough conversations like “outside robotics, are you getting the support you need?”

Every team has a few students whose skills and drive are just out of this world. We’re talking “they’re a mad scientist, we have to make sure these skills are only used for good” levels. But this also means that we have to guide them on how to reign that in - not to stifle them, not to say “hey, you’re making this too good”, but to understand that perfect is the enemy of good (and done! Remember, we’re on a tight schedule).

As students progress through high school with the team, we try to turn them into mentors as well. Maybe not formally, but reminding them that it’s great that they know how to do something, but it’s now on them to teach a newer team member and pass those skills on. As I’ve been reminded by my mentors in the data community, you don’t really know something until you can teach it to someone else.

We’ve been in the shop when students get the email from an engineering school informing them that they’re getting a huge scholarship - before their parents knew, we knew. They got that scholarship because of what they learned on the robotics team. Other students have gone on to start teams in college. Students have joined the team with one plan for college, and by the time their senior year comes around, they’ve shifted to computer science or an engineering field. And the mentors on the team get some of the credit for that, for showing their students practical applications of something they never would have even considered previously.

Finally, I want to point out that this is absolutely not a one-way street. While I may be a mentor in title, I am learning a lot from these kids every year. Especially when they ask me why I’m suggesting doing something very different from their original idea. They make me question my own assumptions and opinions, and will talk me into seeing that their way is the better way. I learn, they get validation, everyone wins.