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I am a student at the U of Alaska and I am putting a team together for the 2006 FSAE competion. What I was wondering is what are some good ways to get the word around and what kind of events could I plan to attract a crowd to advertise the team? And I don't have any previous cars that we could put out on the front lawn... so as far as resources go, I am somewhat limited.
ANY advice would be wonderful!
Thanks
Erin Urvina
I am a student at the U of Alaska and I am putting a team together for the 2006 FSAE competion. What I was wondering is what are some good ways to get the word around and what kind of events could I plan to attract a crowd to advertise the team? And I don't have any previous cars that we could put out on the front lawn... so as far as resources go, I am somewhat limited.
ANY advice would be wonderful!
Thanks
Erin Urvina
students here always show up for free pizza.
Mike Miles
Carnegie Mellon SAE/Carnegie Mellon Racing -- Formula SAE 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006
You can try any of the professional advisors at your school. They usually can send out e-mail announcements to students at your school.
More people will come if they think there'll be pie and punch!
Xtreme Posters
It's alright to bride people with food to get them to show up at your first meeting. However, you have to make it perfectly clear that this is an engineering design competition. You're going to want people that like challenges and solving problems. You're not just building a FormulaSAE car; you're designing a FormulaSAE car. This is a HUGE difference, and I think that should be your main emphasis. If a person asks if they can be on the team to just help build the car, I don't think you want that person on your team.
Don't get me wrong though. It is important to have people with fabrications skills, but you want those people to also help design the car so you are designing something that you can actually build!
Managing Student Vehicle Projects
It is very important to have effective team management, and it also helps to have a very enthusiastic advisor.
Good luck on your team, and maybe I'll see you at the 2006 competition!
One of the best papers on how to run a fsae team is Organizing a Formula SAE Team by Alan Gruner. It is excellent. I have a copy somewhere but I'm sure you can google to find it.
My advice would be to get a professor interested about the project and get their support. Then get a short professional presentation, powerpoint slides and a short video of some fsae cars driving, and show it to every student you can in the Mechanical Engineering department and a couple in the Electrical Engineering department during lectures. Then get as many of the interested people as you can to a meeting where you outline a bit more about fsae.
Try to get as many people as you can to the competition in Pontiac this May. You will learn so much about fsae in those 3 days its not funny. Do your research beforehand so you can ask sensible questions to the teams about their cars and also you can understand what you are looking at when you see them. Take lots of photos and video while you are there. Its also not a bad idea to ask some of the design judges their opinions on what to do and what not to do when building a first year car.
Glad to see that they are still using one of our old UF cars for the formula extreme poster, at least we got that on Cornell. hehehe.
You can read all you want but nothing will help you out more by seeing a schools program and car. There are some teams that have very good programs that migh not mind speaking with you. Maybe a team in Canada that is in B.C. or western washington u. I am not voluteering these people but you can really cut months of questions just by going to talk to some team and touch their car. Worth a shot if you wanna spend some bucks on a plane ticket.
<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Erin:
I am a student at the U of Alaska and I am putting a team together for the 2006 FSAE competion.
Erin Urvina
Code:"...with powershifts and tiresmoke for all"
I also agree about getting the backing of the departmental head or one of the senior staff members. The most important areas of our car design are allocated to 3rd and 4th year masters students and the marks count towards a large proportion of our degree - this tends to get the best out of people!
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