Support Squads

[skokle]

At my uni, like many others, most of the work is done by final year students who get credit for their work. We are looking at running a more formal support squad than previous years, consisting of younger students.

For those that run a support squad, I wanted to know:

- how do you attract helpers?
- who organises them?
- and most importantly, what type of tasks do they do for you?

Cheers

[skokle]

At my uni, like many others, most of the work is done by final year students who get credit for their work. We are looking at running a more formal support squad than previous years, consisting of younger students.

For those that run a support squad, I wanted to know:

- how do you attract helpers?
- who organises them?
- and most importantly, what type of tasks do they do for you?

Cheers

[Colin]

we've just started doing this sort of thing at swiny and it's working well, we started by going to the second and third year classes and letting them know what sae was all about and how they could help even if they weren't in second year. We also got one of the third year classes to do an assignment on a design aspect of the car. This got a lot of newbies down to the work shop to ask us questions, as for who looks after them they pretty much just rock up and we give them a job, a good thing to get them to do is repair/look after old cars for driver training and testing, or sorting out your trailer, or making trolley's for the car all those things that would do if you had the time, but it pretty much depends on their commitment level and skills

[Chase]

Newbies, are especially key to success in the years to come and during thier first year on the team as well. I honestly don't see how alot of you get your cars done if you don't have newbie support. We actually seek Freshmen to join the team primarily because: 1. They learn as they go
2. When they become design leaders they know more about how to go about being one.
3. They learn how to do the basic things like learn how to use a lathe, tube notching, milling easy parts, learning some of the CAD based programs, and most importantly learning how to interact with other people on the team more efficiently.
In my case last year I was a newbie and I honestly didn't know much then. I didn't ask the dumb questions most newbies did(fast does it go, kind of engine,horsepower) because I had been by the shop a few years earlier on a tour and had asked them. Well to get back to what I was saying, I learned more about how to do things the right way when I was a newbie and towards the end of the spring semester I was relied on plenty of times to get things done on the car. Which made me act more responsibly about the whole thing. This year I am designing the brake system for our car and I do believe I am doing a good job at it, regardless of what snags I have run into it will get done and I believe it will be great.

[Denny Trimble]

Our team has benefited greatly over the last few years from the recruitement of underclassmen, but recently our key underclassmen have had trouble getting admission to the ME department (start of the Junior year), because their GPA tends to drop when they work on this project. Unfortunately, this Tier 1 Research University cares about theory and grades more than experience and learning.

But that's why we do FSAE - it fills the gap http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif