Student Leadership Council
The Student Leadership Council is a program aimed at building effective student leaders within FRC San Diego teams while promoting a proactive and unified Team San Diego. In the interest of building student leaders from every team, the program features meetings hosted and ran by the students. These meetings would include workshops where students would teach other students effective communication skills and strategies in FIRST.
To strengthen the power of Team San Diego as an organization but to support future sustainability of both TSD and FIRST teams in the San Diego Area, the Student Leadership Council will effectively assist Team San Diego in not only effectively facilitating Team San Diego programs, but spread the message of FIRST and gracious professionalism as well.
THE PROJECT
In addition to periodic Team San Diego meetings, the initiative would require each team to hold workshop meetings at their individual school. The students on the team from that school would be in charge of creating the meeting agenda, facilitating the skill building workshop, and organizing FIRST and Team San Diego updates to communicate with the participating teams. The locations of the meetings would rotate each time in a system that will be decided and agreed upon by all participating teams.
Example workshops would include: communications, how to write an email, how to conduct an interview, how to respond when being interviewed, how to answer judge’s questions during competitions, how to build a team image etc.
THE REASONING BEHIND IT
Every since we lost our primary mentor and veteran students, Team 812 had to rebuild ourselves as an organization. We learned (1) that a successful FRC team has to document everything in order to ensure the smooth transition of knowledge from one generation to the next, (2) a successful FRC team has to instill within their students the legacy of that team year after year, and, most importantly, (3) a successful FRC team has to be TRULY STUDENT-RUN.
We once took credit for the things our mentors did and many teams still do. Having seen the consequences of this, we realized that the team we must become and, thankfully, the team we have become is one that is ran on student initiative, student facilitation, student organization, and STUDENT leadership.
Our redefining what being a “student-run” means has inspired every San Diego FIRST team, from Team Spyder, 1622, to Team Full Throttle, 2599, to raise the bar and turn their programs into student lead programs. While we cannot take all the credit, we are so humbled being the impetus for it.
