Challenges of Leadership

Having been in a leadership position for one entire season, here is what I learned. But before I begin, I would like to explain what my leadership position on the team entails. To start off, I am our robotics team mechanical lead. In this position, I oversee everything mechanical starting from the brainstorming -> prototyping -> design and CAD -> manufacturing and fabrication -> assembly. During the offseason, I am responsible for training all of our rookie members to learn how to implement the Engineering Design Process and apply this process to real life: in our case, the creation of a robot. During the official season, I am responsible for leading the design and construction of our robot in which we have 8 weeks to brainstorm, design, build, and test before our first competition that is in the first week of March.

Teaching is difficult, especially to a large group of students.

When it comes to learning a new skill, everyone has a different pace in which they are able to learn the skill at. This difference amongst students may come from them already having previous knowledge and experience or merely the fact that they are fast learners. What makes it difficult for me as a lead is to find the right pace to teach at, in order for all students to follow now matter how fast or slow they learn. One thing for sure about CAD and design is that it is much easier to teach 1 on 1 than it is to teach a group. Being able to sit down 1 on 1 with a new member allows me to thoroughly explain why something is done a certain way in a certain process and it also allows the student to ask me questions directly in which I can answer without holding up the rest of the lesson.

In order to succeed, one must put in their own time and effort.

When I had first learned to CAD and eventually design my own mechanisms, I was never taught by anyone else other than myself. All of my learning came from YouTube videos, Chief Delphi (Reddit for Robotics), and robotics Discord servers. A lot of my learning came from my own time and dedication. I wanted our team to succeed. This mindset unfortunately does not carry over to ALL the members on the mechanical team. Like learning any other skill, “practice makes progress”. But that is something that many students refuse to do, simply because they do not care as much. Some members may be part of the team simply because their friends are on the team, others may be part of the team because they want to add it to their college resume. Everyone has a different reason for being on the team, but the problem with this is that without a full force of dedicated members, knowledge is less likely to be passed down year after year, creating a not so sustainable team. Another cause for this problem likely is that CADding and designing is not fun. Having put hundreds of hours into CAD myself, I can agree with this statement. It's boring to sit down and stare at a screen for hours at a time. But the truth is that it MUST be done in order to learn and grow your own individual skills.

Building sustainability.

This coming season will be my last year being part of the team. One thing that my mentors told me recently was that they worry what direction the team will go in once the class of 2024 is no longer there. I, along with many other seniors on the team, carry a lot of knowledge that helps us to be successful, which we have been compared to the last 6 years in our team history. The problem with this is that once we leave, we take all of this knowledge with us and little to none is kept on the team. The root of this problem could be many things. The first problem that I would like to point out is the motivation of individual members to learn. Like I had mentioned earlier, the lack of enthusiasm for robotics and wanting to learn the skills and knowledge required to have a successful team prevents the team from being sustainable. A sustainable team is when knowledge is passed down year after year and mistakes are improved upon year after year. On a sustainable team, the knowledge is not kept in only one year and relearned the next, but the knowledge is constantly growing from class to the next.