[BaileyJoseph166]

I think most FRC teams struggle with that dichotomy, where you have the "engineering" kids who do the programming, CAD, and material fabrication and then the business and marketing people who focus on the Chairman's award and other submissions. Going into my senior year, I was one of 166's captains, and we had just lost our entire Marketing subteam. I'm talking every single student in that subteam graduated, all at once. I was left with a dilemma, I needed new Marketing students to work with me for that side of the team.

While looking to improve overall team involvement and recruitment, we decided to market our FRC team to not just the STEM kids in our school. My other co captain and I went around to all the honors classes that freshmen can take, including the honors English classes that we had not directly advertised to before. We also put up tons of posters in our school with big flashy text saying that the team had a nontechnical side to it as well.

Come the fall, we had grown the team from 20 students after graduation to 44. However, we only had 2 Marketing students, and I was one of them! Instead of broadcasting to the team members over and over and over again about joining Marketing, we offered it at a team meeting, sent a follow up email and then starting sifting through essays. Every student who wants to join 166 needs to write an entry essay about "What FIRST means to me?" or some other topic I do not remember. A few mentors and I sat down and started to read through all of them (we usually don't, but now we finally had a reason!) and highlighted bits and pieces of quotations we liked and noted the authors. When we were done, we went up to each students individually and asked them if they would like to join the Marketing team in conjunction with their Engineering work.

Needless to say that worked and now we have a budding Marketing team and I'm sure they will grow larger in the years to come. I think the key to getting business students involved might not be to only look outside the team for growth, but to advertise the non-STEM side to FIRST like leadership, writing, business, marketing to new recruits as well as enforcing it in existing members and showing them that they are already writing really good essays about this program and our team, so why not write a bigger one, a more stressful big time-consuming essay some people like to call "the Chairman's essay".