At Cal Poly Pomona, we do pretty well with $800/yr from the school and a "hands off" professor. Here's what we do to get and keep new guys:

1.) Display a clean, complete, polished car at club recruting events. (Sometimes we just wheel it out near the engineering building.) That car is a freakin magnet.

2.) Put new members to work on meaningful tasks. More "hey, think you could sand that a bit?" and less "Take out the trash, rook!"

3.) Pair rookies with older people. It's less work on us, and more fun for them. We call it the buddy system.

4.) No responsibility = No authority. We don't have a program, and the guys with 3-4 years on the team are either helping with the '07 car, or off the team. This prevents them from being "executive members" that just boss people around. If you aren't designing something, you don't get to boss a rookie around.

5.) Everyone drives the car. If you put in a year on our team, you drive when the season is over. End of story.

6.) Respect the new guys. They're young and dumb sometimes, but they're sharp as hell at other times. They're also you a few years ago. Don't be a jerk. This also means asking them if they're having fun, or how you can improve as officers.

7.) You also want team decisions to be fair, honest, and transparent.

Good luck, and see you all in Detroit, California, and Italy!

Number 7 on that list is very important, not just for new members but even for the oldies around. Nobody likes to feel that important decisions are being made behind closed doors without any consult of the rest of the group, especially when it involves a volunteer orginization.

quote:

Originally posted by Gasperini:
2.) Put new members to work on meaningful tasks. More "hey, think you could sand that a bit?" and less "Take out the trash, rook!"

Being one of the new members to the UWFSAE team this year I've found that number 2 sits above the rest in my opinion. If I wasn't allowed to participate in a way that I felt was helping the team in any tangible way I most likely would not have stayed around. Although some of the tasks that I have done were not quite as important, they actually worked towards getting the car finished. In return for my willingness to help out, I have absorbed copious amounts of new information.
That's just my $.02

This is an excellent thread with all sorts of good advice. This is the first year for our team at Northwestern, and it's also the first time there have been 3 extracurricular vehicular teams working at the same time. I am in an awkward position because I am a freshman, yet I am the acting president of the club, and I have a huge amount of responsibility. Right now I count our active members as the people who have the keys to the shop. As of the moment, that makes 11 including our three captains. That may change at the beginning of next quarter, with everyone coming out from the rocks they've been under with finals. While I have to tread a very very fine line when being authoritative, people tend to respect the amount of time I put into the organization. You all make some excellent points about team dynamics, and I believe giving people meaningful work to do is by far the best decision we have made so far. People seem to lack passion here in the engineering department, so much so that the Dean of Engineering has made it a point to attempt to improve culture here. Drew, Grant and I (The three captains) have made it a point to always have fun and exude pride in what we do, and it rubs off quite a lot on the other guys, they work hard and late to get things done and we all respect the work we do. I can honestly say we're lucky to have made it this far, building a team from nothing and competing in the same year is going to be rough on all of us these next few months, but I see worth in what we do, and that's what matters.

Here at UT we have a neat philosophy behind FSAE.


I'm a member from another school who transferred and started the program here this year. I was struggling to gain a footing inside an SAE club that is already highly developed and has a capstone design project associated with it (translating to no upperclassmen in the formula team).

I've come to the conclusion that the core members do exist out there, it's just a matter of finding them. I did a search on facebook for everyone at my school who had the mention of cars or racing in their profiles and sent out mass messages. Same with local car forums.

The results have been overwhelming...

I have 10 freshman/sophomores coming to learn solid modeling on a weekly basis (for 3 hours at a time), 15 guys learning machine tools and fab techniques, and several who do racing on the side... shifter karts, hpde's, etc etc etc

The system works... and well.

To sum the philosophy... it's all about mass numbers. The weak will weed themselves out, especially with a fast pace in learning and design, but the inherent side effect is that you gain the dedicated people you need by sheer exposure.

quote:

Originally posted by NU mafia:
blah blah blah...

That's good to hear!

Brand new orginizations have a very loose leadership structure, and I believe the attutude you have can have a huge influence on the team culture. (Among other things!) I can see you are on the right track here, and it appears to be paying off.

Where will we be seeing you compete this year?

Hello Tony, and all the other teams reading and responding to this thread.

As I research more about other teams, it is definetely no suprise to hear you expressing your recruitment and retainment troubles.

Hopefully some information I've found is something that will be of use to us all.

First of all, I am fortunate to be on a team that has been around 10 years; of those I've been involved in the last 3 1/2. Not very long ago our team had the same syptoms many of you have shared; such as autocratic leaders and less members than you can count on one hand.

Within the last 2-3 years, our FSAE team has started doing more work on Teaming, and conducting feedback surveys to current members and team alumnus. With the feedback, we have worked to resolve many issues that were causing all these common problems. One of the surveys we used was from the book, "The 5 dysfunctions of a Team."

As this work has continued, we have seen our team grow from about 5 core members doing all the work, to about 15 really putting in a decent effort. This is more than we hoped for, even when we had 60 people initially sign up at the beginning of fall semester.

I also attribute the success to teaming activities we do in our weekly meetings. This year in our meetings, we have had team led discussions and demonstrations of "Giving and Receiving Feedback," "Asset Distribution," "Team Cognition," and a few others. We also have planned fun team events after certain milestones are acheived - making a more personal connection outside of campus.

Finally, one of the best retainment techniques we've used is letting the incoming members have thier own meetings, entitled, "Formula Future," where they discuss and research team development, understanding a Learning Organization, Core Values, and all kinds of future innovations or projects they would like to try relating to the racecar. Instead of just having them do grunt work, they are given free reign to a variety of projects they conceive, such as swapping an f4i engine for a single cyl. with a CVT, Tool wagon design and manufacture, Design Board manufacturing, prototype shifter, and launch control. Of course to do all this, they are all teamed up with experienced team members, but that is an integral part of our program. Their projects all have a budget, deadlines, and must report Preliminary Design Reviews and Critical Design Reviews before the whole team and advisors. This gives them a real taste of how in depth and busy the main project is. It also allows them to experience successes and failures.

I will also note that it does help to have more mature members on the team. All the grad-students we've had have been excellent members. Compared to some teams, we lack this aspect. Dr. Woods even mentioned this same thing to us, expressing one of his opinions about some of UTA's success being related to the large amount of grad-students enrolled.

It is a long process to getting a consistently healthy team. Some people will not join your team until they see a history of success; so it takes a while. Keep recruiting at every event you can. We work very hard to do this, and our school has less than 2000 students. We even start with High School students. I don't know how we do it, because we have an additional 8 student projects in addition to the 4 SAE; and all the school funding for these projects is divided among these 12 teams. Anyway, expect a healthy team to take at least one full year to build.

You must also expect a 40 - 66% rate of loss in human capital every year. From what other teams have shared with me, even the best teams, this is the percentage that they experience.

Hope this gives you some encouragement, and the best of luck to you all,
Aaron

quote:

Originally posted by Gasperini:

quote:

Originally posted by NU mafia:
blah blah blah...

That's good to hear!

Brand new orginizations have a very loose leadership structure, and I believe the attutude you have can have a huge influence on the team culture. (Among other things!) I can see you are on the right track here, and it appears to be paying off.

Where will we be seeing you compete this year?

Yes, and it's been quite a learning experience stepping up and doing this. We will be competing in Fontana this year because we *barely* registered. Me and my two other co-captains had enough faith in ourselves and each other to build a team this year that we put up the money and registered before we were even a student group or anywhere on the radar of the Northwestern administration. Sometimes I wish we weren't on the radar of the Northwestern administration, hahaha.

Luckily, one of our advisors is the Dean of Undergraduate Engineering, so he plugs the fact that we exist any chance he gets to incoming freshmen.

This is my experience.

First some background, I grew up in a motorsport family and have worked in motorsport for the past 7 years with a team who prepare cars for a few national saloon car championships. I also work as a race car driving instructor and have the dubiously prestigous title of having more track miles at my local circuit than any other person.

Having noticed that the years are clocking by, I've begun a course of study to become a mechanical engineer. I was aware that my university had an FSAE team and I attended their open day and subsequent team meetings.

The open day-
This was held in the workshop and was combined with a meeting of the existing team and sub-teams. There wasn't any particular formal structure and it primarily consisted of the prospective members standing around with their hands in the pockets looking at the previous years car. There were a few current members who chatted with the prospective members and a short speech by the faculty member in charge of the team.

Weekly meeting 1 -
The faculty member in charge of the team engaged in a 20 minute speech ended with asking the prospective members what course they were studying and then arbitrarily assigning them to a team. Still zero interaction between continuing members and prospective new members.

Weekly meeting 2 -
Noticable decrease in the number of prospective new members (from perhaps ~50 to ~15). Meeting consisted of another 20 minute speech by the faculty man followed by a rant and random threats from the H&S officer.

Weekly meeting 3 -
No official weekly meeting, out of curiousity I poked my nose into the workshop and found it full of the existing team members deeply engaged in debate, design and discussion.

Summary -
In my time I've been part of many organisations, with roles from grunt to group leader. Including 15 years working in and running volunteer organisations. This is how I see the team at my university...

(1) The existing members are interested in the car, they recognise (as do we all) that the vast majority of prospective members will fall by the wayside and never make a meaningful contribution to the team and as such are disinterested in making that connection.

(2) The faculty member is largely there to feed his ego, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, we all have a reasons for becoming involved. But this means he takes on the vast majority of interaction with the new students.

(3) Somewhere hidden behind him is the actual team that is making the car (By now I know who these people are), they do their best to keep their work largely away from the faculty members attention, in that they (possibly rightly) feel that he isn't as knowledgable as he maintains.

(4) Of the other prospective members I spoke with, the vast majority of those who remain are the 'school-leavers' with minimal or zero practical knowledge who spend most of their time having guessing competitions based on 'magazine and internet knowledge', of the reasonably experienced prospective members I spoke with, only two have remained and only because the existing team latched onto them because of their fitting/turning background.

Where does this leave me... I could wander into the next team meeting, list my background and experience and become deeply involved in the team for the next half a decade... but quite frankly I don't feel the least bit inclined. FSAE interests me, but so far this team doesn't.

Interestingly, I've been warmly welcomed in my interactions with a few members of FSAE team from the neighbouring university (natural arch-enemies).

Oh, guess which university I'm from and I'll buy you a pint.

-noname.

can you narrow the choices down to a specific continent?

I'd say Europe, and sounds like he/shes from England. The post uses "saloon, H&S and pint," just a hunch. Noname, what does that get me?

This sounds about right. As a new member you must engage the current members and participate in discussions or as you said they might look at you as another student that will fall by the waist side. It is easy to let members slip away because you are too busy designing/building a car.

Hope things turn out better for you. Hey, you could always become really active and change the team for the better given your experience.

Cheers,

quote:

Hey, you could always become really active and change the team for the better given your experience.

Its precisely that response which is why I'm disinclined to raise the issue with the team and I'd contend the logic within is flawed.

Person 1: "I don't feel welcome around here"
Person 2: "Well why not spend lots of time around here completely changing the place into something you do like"
Person 1: (blank stare)(long pause) "You are kidding, right?"

I'll throw a guess and say you're at Monash.

As a prospective member of a team, and as one with experience, it's clear you'd be an asset to the team. Assuming that you are willing to work properly and productively with others.

However sounds like you just need to evaluate whether it's worth your time and effort to be a part of the team. I would say, if you make the effort, it will pay off. but it is up to you.

In your case, at meeting number 3, you ought to have shown yourself in, listened to the discussion, and made the existing members aware that you exist. Then keep showing up and start to offer opinions or even better, offer to help work on something.

It's really not that hard to become involved. And at that point, you'll have a much better idea if it's something that really interests you, or if you have enough racing under your belt to just concentrate on the engineering side of things.

quote:

Originally posted by noname:

quote:

Hey, you could always become really active and change the team for the better given your experience.

Its precisely that response which is why I'm disinclined to raise the issue with the team and I'd contend the logic within is flawed.

Person 1: "I don't feel welcome around here"
Person 2: "Well why not spend lots of time around here completely changing the place into something you do like"
Person 1: (blank stare)(long pause) "You are kidding, right?"

There's something to be said for that. This is what sets people apart, the ability to change the status quo. We ran into a shitstorm of opposition from uptight administrators because this was a new thing. They now know me as the one to get things done. When I get a chance to sit down and structure the team again, I'm writing it somewhere that all members of the team have equal rights. I will NOT let this team become a clique, I've been excluded from too many things in my life before college to do that to other people.

I end up doing a lot of work with newbies on our team and the biggest thing that drives them away is when the senior guys ignore them, just talk to the guys a little bit even if you dont remember their name.

Ive also found that a good way to get guys interested is to have them work on older cars, they can get experience without it being a disaster if they mess it up. just a thought