Passionate People Can Do Fantastic Things

Estimated reading time: 15 minutes

Matties: As a mentor, what core competencies are you trying to share with these kids? What do you hope that they take away? 

Massengill: I want them to find something to be passionate about. Both of my parents were teachers, and it took me a long time to realize that what I was doing was teaching in my own way. If you had asked me in high school or college if I wanted to be a teacher, the answer was no. But now what excites me is seeing students become passionate about something. 

And to be clear, I want it to be robotics, but it’s totally okay if a student does robotics for a year and says, “You know what? I had a lot of fun, but I don’t want to do this. I want to go do something else.” There are a lot of other opportunities out there. 

Matties: How do you approach that? How do you unlock that passion in a young person to be excited about this? 

Massengill: First, you must demonstrate it yourself. It doesn’t seem like anyone gets excited for somebody who’s not excited already. You must have somebody who’s passionate to begin with to get you excited about something. Beyond that it’s helping them recognize their potential. 

We take students from the surrounding community now. We get students who are ninth and 10th graders now, which is awesome. They come in and they’re surrounded by 11th and 12th grade students who have been doing it for two or three years longer, potentially.  

Matties: They have more experience. 

Massengill: Right. They have a lot more experience. They’ve been around, and they’re very confident in what they do. We get students who are very timid; they’re worried about failing, really. We get them over that hurdle. Failing is fine as long as you can recover and keep going; you can’t give up. If you do, then that’s the actual failure.  

Effectively, we’re building one-off prototypes every year. It’s hard to have the expectation that it will work perfectly every time, but you hope it does. The important thing is that you come back, and you fix it. You diagnose the problem, troubleshoot, realize where the error is, resolve the error, then move on to the next thing and the next, and so on. Finally, you get to the end of it and say, “Wow, we were one of the finalists at that event and we placed second overall.” And “This is fantastic. We can do a little bit better next year and we’ll be first. It’ll be all right.”

One of the things that FIRST, and FRC in particular, provides for the students is teaching them that notion of failure. It’s not just that it’s a mentor-based program. It’s they have a reasonably effective framework for enabling students to fail and in a controlled environment. That it’s the robot’s part of it, but there’s all this culture and everything else that’s part of it too. It’s an environment where you need to do well to be successful, but if you’re not, if you’re struggling, somebody’s there to help you. Teams are always helping each other at events. It’s one of the things, particularly in North Carolina, that we see a lot. Every team has their struggles to overcome.  

Matties: You’re really implementing just-in-time training, because if you can use it, there’s a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction designing it; it’s really purpose-driven. 

Massengill: Yes. In that regard, it’s key to why the team is as successful as it is. Recently, we’ve been talking to the school about how to distill this down and turn it into a class because it seems exciting to us to offer credit to students. Our worry is whether students will take it because they want it to take a class and then expect it to be like every other class? Have an assignment tossed at them and then do homework? 

Or will they keep doing what they’re doing now, where they get super excited about it? It’s a challenge. I think it’s one of those things that’s part of the magic—the notion of the just-in-time challenge. 

Matties: Why is that difficult for teams at that level? That would seem pretty obvious for someone with a trained eye like yours, able to spot kids who are passionate, or could be passionate. 

Massengill: Ultimately, I think it’s people. It’s easy to fall into the trap that “a teenager is a teenager is a teenager,” but the reality is they all have personalities. They’re all a little bit different. They all have different motivators. Some students are very excited about laying out traces on a board, while others are more interested in other aspects. One of the challenges of management and mentoring is finding the right motivators. 

You asked earlier about what I’d like students to take away from this, and I’d say one thing is change. I work in IT and one of the epiphanies during COVID was that we saw six years of change happen in six months. It was crazy to witness and be a part of it. My job is hard, but it had never been as frantic as it was for a while there. And we’re just now calming down but it’s still not back to normal yet because we have supply chain constraints across the board. Change is constant, particularly with anything to do with technology. It’s inevitable.  

Matties: Isn’t that the life that we live? 

Massengill: Yes. I think we’re still in a phase where we see students who learn something from one class, and something else from another, and they look around and say, “How can I apply this skill?” That’s not necessarily the wrong approach, but I want them to think, “How do I take what I’ve learned and apply it in a more fundamental way?”  

I would like to see more of that across the board from education in general. Not that you need to learn something like Python or Java, but learn basic logic for programming so that you can apply those to everything. 

Matties: Over the years, I’ve spoken to people who have worked as mentors, and they get emotional talking about their experiences. 

Massengill: Oh, yes, absolutely. Seeing them have an “ah-ha moment” and recognizing that they’re doing something that they didn’t think they could do is extraordinarily motivating. It’s what keeps me going. I work with a lot of large companies and it’s not that they’re backward or that they’re wrong. But they have a lot of processes built up over time. There are a lot of good reasons for that, but it’s also extraordinarily frustrating on a day-to-day basis when things don’t move as fast as I would like them to. It’s just because I’m a motivated and passionate person and I want things to move quickly so I can move on to whatever’s next. 

Matties: But that mentality also helps you teach the students patience, I hope. 

Massengill: For me, it’s extraordinarily motivating and inspiring because we get to move at that pace. It’s crazy how quickly one of these robots comes together every year. And it’s mind-blowing when students see it too. They keep me on my toes and keep me motivated. Every year, I learn something new. I’m inspired every year. 

Matties: That’s great. You’re working on the future of the world, and we appreciate it. 

Massengill: Thank you.

• < Previous Page