Jackson Bergstrom - President

[Jake]

I think your heart is in the right place here, but I think it'd be worth hearing your thoughts on a few things that I (and others) observed over the last year. I'm asking you because as President, you end up as the "catch all" guy for the officers at large, even if certain things kinda fall under "not my job."

You bring up the lack of connection between students and alumni, but I think the problem is larger than just that. We really saw a breakdown in communications in general - no officers were very prevalent on the forums, emails to alumni were infrequent, the mmsports.org homepage never had any posts, etc. If you/the club are trying to promote MM to the likes of NASA and SCCA in the state, to alumni who want to help get students involved, and so on, then you need to focus communication efforts beyond GroupMe. You are working with groups of adults and the club's presence has to reflect that. This is largely a breakdown in the secretary/social role, but if that officer is consistently not producing, it's on you to handle it and/or just do it yourself.

Going off of that, it's felt like there has been no real schedule set at the start of each semester. The officers should be meeting before the semester or immediately after it starts to plan every event, and an email with tentative dates should go out within that first week. Get everyone hyped, make them mark dates on their calendars, and even if it's not all 100% set, show to students and alums that you are making progress.

Second - the years of MM that have seen the most success are the ones where an officer(s) are going to every single event they can. Students will not attend if you and the others aren't there. If you want this leadership role, you need to commit to being there for every autocross, every NASA weekend, etc. and make sure some other officer can be there if you can't. If you want the club to be closer to NASA, you need to be working events and encouraging other students to do the same. I spent over an hour with Cobetto after the party on Saturday night discussing how MM and NASA have had this super long, super great relationship. He and Laura WANT to have more of us help out. We helped make NASA Mid-Atlantic be the gigantic force of racecars that it is today and we need to keep that up.

I've been really pleased with the number of students who seem so enthusiastic about MM this year, and I think there will be a lot of participation next year as people are able to afford events, park cars, etc. Clearly the officers have influenced that to a point, so don't think I'm sitting here bitching without recognizing the work that's gone in. We had 16ish people in my trailer on Friday night which was fantastic. But, I wanted to get your thoughts on those couple of points above as I think with some small changes, next year could be really really good.