Student presidents

[loyal]

Our group, when it comes to management, has a President, VP, Treasurer, and Secretary. Since we are a rookie team, we had to spend almost a month of build time and time in December to organize ourselves. We held our elections based on a normal candidate/campaign structure with anonymous votes. Merit and popularity dictated who was chosen. We only have about 15 members, so our leaders also must work in a subteam (electrical, build, strategy/rules/fundraising/spirit/scout, Design/CAD, and programming). Many other responsibilities such as Drivers, drive coach, safety captain, and Scoutmaster have to be taken by students who already have multiple jobs. President and VP are mostly in charge of running meetings along with the head mentor. However, we make it a strict policy that mentors are only allowed to teach and help; students must do the work. In general, we are very democratically run, to the point where it takes 1.5-2 hour meetings just to discuss simple issues. As a result, the President and VP are needed to finish their normal work as well as assign jobs and tasks to the other members so that work gets done and members are just sitting there playing games on the computers. VP and President, in the end, choose how much work they can handle for themselves. They can either give responsibility to a mentor who will then give out work or the Cabinet can interact and assign jobs themselves. Our VP tends give out jobs himself because he knows a bit about every subteam and is part of the design/CAD team. However, our President, due to other commitments, cannot always attend whole meetings. Thus, he has the VP take charge or gives the mentors the OK to assign jobs to members of their subteam. Our Treasurer tends to work by himself or has mentor help. Our Secretary works the same way as well. In Retrospect, I believe we should have given them more support rather than avoid them and leave them to their own devices. In Summary, our method has pros and cons.
Cons: Slow, Issues arise in who holds what power, Dependent on only a few people, Takes time to set up, Leaders can get a lot of flak for not listening to public opinion, whether it is right or wrong, and Can be hard to keep discipline during meetings.
Pros: Very much in the spirit of FIRST, Listens to everyone's opinion, Doesn't leave out individuals, and prevents mentors from doing all of the work since the students act as their own police force
In the end, I suggest the rookies and even older teams pick the type of government most suited to their needs. They must look at all of the factors such as number of mentors, students, competence, enthusiasm, location, and work ethic. Just one type of government can't work for them all, as Rookies we were lucky that our government is at least functional and has functioned enough for us to achieve the Rookie All Star Award.

[ras103]

103 has a detailed corporate structure. We are a 501c3 and run as close to a business as we possibly can.

We have our head mentors/team advisers as our CEO's:
Cathy Beck (co-founder), Jack Tusman, and Chris Willman.
We also have various other mentors and parent mentors who form an executive board for our team/business.

Then we have student leaders who are elected by their peers. I, myself, am Madam President this year! We have all female officers for the first time this year. Our Vice President is a senior, as is our Secretary and our Treasurer is a junior.

We also have student leaders within our three main departments, as follows:
I have been the Head of PR/Marketing for the past few years. We have a Head of Manufacturing and a Head of animation. They are the role models for other student team members as well as the experts in their perspective areas.

As a leadership side note, something that works well for us is Peer mentor/mentees to help students transition and balance school and robotics.
Every Junior and Senior student is assigned a freshman or sophomore student. They are there for help with fundraising, if the young student needs a tutor in a specific subject, or anything else they may need.

The students leaders play a role in decision making and are consulted on our mentors bigger decisions. We also run most of the team fundraisers ourselves, organizing as well as executing the tasks that need to be done. We organize community outreach and a lot of the time our mentors just show up as chaperons. Cybersonics has always been based on student-driven tasks, having a structure with student leaders helps to make sure that continues on year after year. They have authority and are looked up to; students on our team understand that their work won't be done for them. We are a smaller team, being about 30 students, so this also helps to make sure everything gets done that needs to get done before build season starts.

[Joshuamunson]

I am the CEO of team 2996 cougars gone
we are a 100% student run
We run our team with a CEO a CFO and business and technical VPs
I was the VP of programming last year, so I am jumping from direct contact with the robot to direct contact with paperwork and sponsors
my job is anyone's guess, to oversee the team and make things run smoothly
as to day-to-day work, I have yet to get there, but I'm sure it's no different from the planning I've done this summer