How does your team recruit students?

[MechEng83]

Everything we do is a tool to recruit students -- sometimes for immediate opportunities, sometimes sparking long term interest in young kids.

On direct recruitment, here's some stuff we do:
1. We have spring callout meetings at each of our local middle schools where we demo the robot, talk about the business, media, engineering, project planning and fundraising experience students can get as well as potential college scholarships.
2. We set up at Freshman registration and let kids drive the robot and talk to them about FIRST opportunities.
3. We do the same thing at the Frozen Yogurt party for new students the school does the day before classes start.
4. We have a booth at the club fair.
5. We have fall callouts in late August where we invite kids and parents to tour our shop and show them all we do for the robot and Chairman's.
6. We set up during Meet the Teacher Night and Parent Teacher Conferences (sometimes you get students when you 'recruit' their parents).
7. We do a float for the homecoming parade.


For indirect/long term recruiting, our outreach events get us exposure in the community. We go and show the robot to elementary schools. We have kids entering high school this year that have wanted to join the team since they saw a demo in kindergarten. We run FLL teams at both the elementary schools and middle schools.


To keep the kids involved and occupied in the fall, we have plenty of outreach events. We do trainings on everything from CAD and electronics, to leadership and teamwork. We have activity nights, movie nights, and team parties. We go to off-season events and let interested students drive.