Gator Motorsports Forum

This thread is intended to provide feedback on each event we host or attend so next year's team can learn from our experience. After an event, one of the event organizers should post a short update here so it's all in one place. If other team members want to provide feedback as well, that's great. This will allow the team to analyze which events/methods of recruiting seem more effective than others. It will also allow the team to plan for the events better the following year. Please organize your replies like this:

Subject Heading: Event Name

Event Description: i.e. ESWAMP

Event Date: i.e. Saturday August 29th

Event Location: Lake Waulberg

Team Resources Needed: baja car, 3 team members, ...

Feedback: Discuss what went well & what didn't. Did we need more members in attendence? Were there a a lot of students at the event, other student organizations or any faculty? Should we bring a tent or program fliers next time? An interested student signup sheet? A notebook with photos of the formula project and some of the parts we design and manufacture for it? Etc.

Thanks.

Event Description: Spoke for two or so minutes in the beginning of Mechanics of Materials the first day the Fall '09 semester.

Event Date: Monday, August 24th 2009

Event Location: NPB1001

Team Resources Needed: 1 or 2 members, a flash drive with a slide show in case professor uses PowerPoint in class (Dr. Taylor used PowerPoint).

Feedback: There were about 150+ students in the class. It went decently well, I know two kids in MoM showed up at the shop the next day, although maybe on an unrelated note. Ashley heard the presentation was too technical and intimidated some kids (I went a little bit into real stress distributions and average stress, using the two diagrams below. I tried to tie how Mechanics of Materials applied to SAE, but maybe was too detailed in my explanation.





/edit: For future reference, here is the PowerPoint I used.

Event Description: Spoke for two or so minutes in the beginning of Statics the second day of the Fall '09 semester.

Event Date: Wednesday, August 26th 2009

Event Location: NEB100

Team Resources Needed: 1 or 2 members, a flash drive with a slide show in case professor uses PowerPoint in class (Dr. Jenkins didn't use PowerPoint).

Feedback: There were about 100+ students in the class. It went well, Based on the feedback on the technical level of the Mechanics of Materials presentation, I toned it down a notch. I drew a simple free body diagram, explained how soon Dr. Jenkins would be teaching them all these concepts, and how a student that just finished taking Statics a little over a month ago was helping design our vehicle by doing a free body diagram of our wheel/control arms. The kids didn't seem to phase out much, I saw a few kids writing stuff down as I mentioned where the shop was and when we were in it. Hopefully it yields positive results.

Subject Heading: Introduction to Engineering Class Presentation

Event Description: Gave a 15 min presentation on Student Organizations in general, focusing on how SAE has given us experience. The presentation was in the middle of the 1st day of class each semester. 2 days in fall to 200 freshmen, in spring 1 day to around 50 freshmen. We had a 15ish slide power point with video of the Formula car and the questions and answers.

Event Date: Wed, and Thur , 1st week of classes each semester

Event Location: Reitz Union Auditorium

Team Resources Needed: Powerpoint and Ashley and Luther

Feedback: 1st day did it by myself, second day and spring with Luther. The second went better because working with someone else helped me relax. It was important to talk about how Student Orgs. in general are helpful before going into SAE. We were the only Student Organization presenting; Dean Lindner chose us to talk about the benefits of Student Orgs. and how they have effect us, so its good to be well rounded (it helps ensure we are asked back the year after year). My experiance working for the College of Engineering in Preview was helpful to address the bigger Student Org. picture. Note that it is a 2 hour long class and we present at the end to be prepared to sit around for a while.

Event Description: Brought the Baja car out to Lake Wauberg to table for eSWAMP.

Event Date: Saturday, August 29 2009

Event Location: Lake Wauberg

Team Resources Needed: 3 Members, Baja car, chairs and tent.

Feedback: This event was slightly disappointing. Were it not for Ashley bringing over a sizeable group, I doubt that more than 3-4 people would have come to talk to us. Free food was a big plus, and it only lasted 2 hours. I'm not sure how worthwhile it will be to continue presenting at eSWAMP; it'll depend on how many of the people we talked to stick around this year.

I think it is important to table at Eswamp, because it keeps us in good standing with SWE and it is always nice to be friends with other organizations in BEC. Plus, If It wasn't for my SWE mentor telling me and a fellow mentee about SAE at Eswamp I would have never come into the shop.

Thanks for posting the updates. I think this type of feedback is quite valuable for the team.

Let's create a new folder in this season's file share where we can archive the various PowerPoint presentations you have created for these outreach events.

Event Description: New Student Shop Day

Event Date: Friday, September 25th 2009

Event Location: The shop

Team Resources Needed: 6+ members, ideally about 8-10.

Feedback: About 30-40 kids showed up. We had 6 stations:

• Car - Spoke a little about the car, its performance, all the systems, etc.
• Design - Spoke about the design process, how we go about taking a part from concept to finished product. I believe we also presented the steering rack project for those still interested at the end of lab.
• Manual Lathes - Lathe demo
• Manual Mills - Mill demo, stayed afterwards to make jig pieces for torsional testing.
• CNC Mill - CNC demo
• Composites - Explanation of this year's goals for composites, and what the tube-bonding process was about. Stayed afterward to bond the carbon tubing to the aluminum plugs.

I think it was pretty successful. We had plenty of kids come out, hopefully get interested in the program, and help us do a pretty decent amount of work in a short amount of time because there were so many hands involved in those stations.

Sean and I ran the composites station, so I can't speak too much about the others, but I liked how it turned out. We had probably about 10-12 kids show up to the station at the end of the 50 minutes of presentations (6 stations, 7 minute presentations, 1 minute to move between stations.) In part due to lack of preparation on my time, about 3 or 4 of these left after maybe 10-20 minutes while we were prepping the tubes. The remaining 8 or 9 kids stayed until all the tubes were bonded. About 4 stuck around even when there was nothing to do, and seemed really interested in the program and composites, so hopefully we see them back.

For the composites station, I'd recommend just a few things to make it flow smoother next time:

• Once the activity has been planned, verify early in the day what materials are required, and make sure to buy anything that's missing. We for example didn't have acetone or gloves, or lint free paper towels, so we had to borrow all of that from Mike.
• Set all the supplies on the table about 40-30 minutes before the event begins. I only gave myself about 10 minutes, and I had to spend another 10-15 while the kids were ready to work getting the last few supplies.

The carbon tubing went well. It's definitely an activity that could be done at a later date. Sean's concern was that all the tasks were kind of small, and given our limited number of tubes (4) we had say... 3 kids cleaning tubes, 3 kids cleaning plugs, and then 6 doing nothing for a while. So Sean recommends trying to find a simple mold construction/layup for next time, or something like that where we can get more hands involved.

Event Description: All General Body Meetings

Event Date: Sept 17, Oct 22, Dec 3, Jan 21, March 4

Event Location: MAE-B 211 or the shop

Team Resources Needed: a projector, power point, President, Core Members

Feedback: I made sure to plan out 1st GB meeting of the semester after all the craziness of the student organization fair, Engineering Welcome, Class presentations and E-swamp, that way our recruiting outreach served to invite students to the meeting.

Thursday nights at 6:30 were chosen to be consistent and the presidents of the major engineering societies split up the week to avoid meetings overlapping. We shot for once a month, but it ended up being more like 3 a semester.

Meetings were publicized with flyers hung around campus, list serve emails, facebook events and handout flyers at the student org fair.

Make sure to rent the rooms early from the registrar. Renting them all at the beginning of the semester might be a good idea. Remember the registrar doesn't give out room rentals the 1st week of school. This did cause a problem with our 1st general body meeting of spring semester; we never got a room and ended up just using the shop.

The main purpose of the meetings was to tell new recruits more about the program. It served as a formal date to venture into the shop for those too scared to do it on a normal day.I gave a very short PowerPoint about SAE and then we moved over to the shop for the tour. The 1st meetings of each semester get around 50 people, by the end of the semester we are down to 20.

The power point used is too short, I need to practice it some more. I think spicing it up with new topics/ guest speakers would be good, but some team leader already think we spend too much time in general body meetings. I liked that we gave out member of the month gifts formally at the meeting because it showed appreciation of our members, took up time, and hopefully gave new members something to work for. The fact that we had a room near the shop was awesome, we got lucky there, it made it easy walk the 50 or so new students over to the shop. We were short on core team members who attended. Luckily Lane is experienced at give tours to 50 students at once, if he wasn't there the few of us remaining might have struggled.

David and I sent invitations to all the companies which were attending the Career Fair and invited them to come our open house from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. Following that email we received _ RSVPs.

In an effort to "spruce up" the event, David and I gave gifts to all the companies which attended. The gifts were mugs with sponsorship packets and thank you letters in them. Also, we had 100 wings donated by Beef o' Brady's.

On the day of career fair, four companies attended. Procter and Gamble, Sikorsky, The Navy, and Intel. Brian suggested that this lack of attendance was because our time window was too large and too late. I could understand how this would be the case because company representatives might get tired after visiting other organizations and decide to skip out on our event. If this is the case, an easy fix may be to shorten the time window and end at an earlier hour. This will force company representatives to attend our event.

I feel like the gifts were nice and were appreciated by those who attended the open house. Hardly any of the wings were eaten and I suppose it was because all the company representatives were dressed nicely and did not want to stain their clothes. Also, I don't think that food looks very appealing in the shop.

All in all the entire event went well. David and I, as well as a few other members, were able to give all the representatives a tour of the shop and information about our program. However, sometimes the amount of members talking to the representatives was a bit overwhelming and that should be addressed for further events involving possible sponsors.