My name is Chad, and this is my third year on the team. I joined CyberBlue234 as a mentor because I was motivated by my daughter enthusiasm once she joined. I thought my electrical engineering background might be helpful but quickly found I seemed to learn more, working with the team, than I "mentored"! I work at Raytheon in Indianapolis. My title in Lead Systems Engineer but my education and early job experience is in Electrical Engineering. At Raytheon I have worked on a diverse set of projects including radars, sonar, and solar flare detector to name of few. I have worked in many developmental projects and am amazed at the quickness that FIRST robotics teams can take a concept and “bring it to market” which for a FIRST robotics team is the competitions. My goals as a mentor are to create opportunities for the electronics team to learn and work on basic electronics skills plus find more opportunities for all team members to learn about potential careers. As a mentor on the Controls sub-team I enjoy explaining concepts to our high school aged team members that I didn’t learn until engineering school at Michigan State University or maybe didn’t learn until at my first engineering job. FIRST robotics is not only a great opportunity to learn scientific and technical information but also to gain the know-how to use it in a design and development team and see your finished product in action, many engineers have to wait years to get this kind of reward from their work. My favorite FIRST memory was being a "rookie" mentor at my very first IRI. To the newcomer seeing this strange game and all the enthusiasm over make a machine do things that I would never have thought of on my own and everything associated with a FIRST competition was just awe inspiring. I would recommend involvement in a FIRST team to anybody student or adult. You don’t need to be an aspiring engineer or scientist to get involved as the teams have many roles that go way beyond just designing and building a robot. The leadership skill you pick up by the experience are beneficial whether you are a looking forward to college or just thinking about your next task on the job.