[SPurekar]

226 has about 50 students, 18 engineers, 2 teachers, and 3 parents that help regularly.

This year we had 2 co-presidents who were the main link between the students and adults. The presidents led the meetings and anything to the team had to go through the two of us (I’d recommend having 2 presidents over 1, because of the workload and availability issues)

Under the presidents were the 4 workgroup leaders (Management, PR, Robot, Digital). We gave the group leaders a to-do list at the beginning of the season, and they had to create their own timelines to accomplish the tasks. The Robotics workgroup was further split according to the assembly of the robot and the Digital workgroup was divided into web, CAD, and animation. The rest of the students were split into workgroups under the 4 leaders, according to their interests.

One thing 226 has had problems with in the past has been communication within the team. This year, the presidents were the only ones who could email the entire team and all information to the team was communicated in person at team meetings, then emailed out as soon as possible. This gave us two ways to present the information and even those who missed meetings knew what was going on.

We had (and still have) full team meetings once a week where workgroup leaders gave updates on what was happening and asked for any help they needed. Every week, we had leadership meetings with the presidents, workgroup leaders, teacher sponsors, the lead engineers and a few parents where we discussed our progress and set goals for the week.

We had one parent who kept the rest of the parents updated. To get anything to the team, the parents could email only the parent lead, who then told the presidents. The presidents also had to go through the parent lead to get anything to the parents.

For those teams that complain about not having enough student involvement in leadership: The 2 presidents found this year that we were given a lot more responsibility and trust simply because we were assertive at the beginning of the season. We drafted a set of rules both the students and adults were comfortable with and made sure everyone followed them. When anyone stepped over the line, we weren’t hesitant to tell them we could handle the situation. (Don't get me wrong, we love the adults and we know we can't function without them) By giving the adults periodic emails on what we were doing (especially at the beginning), we kept them in the loop and they began to trust us to make the right decisions.

All of the students on leadership are juniors right now, so next year, we’ll each have one person under us to train for the year we graduate. What really helps is if the new leadership steps in during the summer, when the old students can guide them for the first month or so.

This sounds like a lot on paper, but it worked wonderfully this year. Feel free to email/pm me with any questions!

Hope this helps! (wow this is a long post)
~Smita