Competition season is now right around the corner, and there are many of us who have long graduated, but still want to be involved.

Come out and be Formula SAE volunteer! With three official NA competitions now in FSAE Michigan or Lincoln or (for our Canadian/NE US) Formula North!

Volunteers are the real backbones of the competition and there are so many areas one can be involved in, tech inspectors, course workers, event captains, judges, ect. Whether you can commit for the whole competition or just for one day, you really help out on supporting this collegiate design competition.

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I am going to personally plug being a tech inspector, specifically the Lincoln competition. \as most of you know, it is the last year in the foreseeable future that there will be a competition at Lincoln and many of us want it to be the best one yet.\ Working with the tech inspection group in any competition is incredibly rewarding, because most of the people doing it want to see as many cars out there competing in the dynamic events (in a safe and fair manner of course) and we really do work with teams to come up with creative solutions to give each team a chance to show what all of their hard work has been going to over the past year, even sometimes two years! In Lincoln specifically 95% of the combustion cars and (staggering for Lincoln) 71% of the Electric cars left that weekend with their Mechanical tech sticker and, and we had with no major safety incidents in the dynamic events. Now, there has been some constructive criticism on how slow it takes all the teams to get through tech and we are looking into efficiency improvements but it really comes down to volunteer numbers!

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'Well that's a lot of PTO time, and I don't have many days..'

Talk to your employers about this! You may find out that you won't have to use any PTO as you are an ambassador for your company and your giving back to the program that was probably one of the credentials on hiring you and maybe some of your co-workers on.

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'I have been out of the game for a while, and am pretty rusty on rules/designs/ect.'

This is also no issue, as there will be a training session and you will most likely be paired with someone with prior experience in your bay.

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'Alright, I'm sold but I have no idea on how to sign up to volunteer.'

Look no further! The link to volunteer at any of the three North American competitions is right here: https://www.fsaeonline.com/page.aspx?pageid=ae730c67-9180-4f76-9220-c26f012f1859

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I encourage any FSAE alumni to volunteer at competition it is definitely worthwhile. And if you are currently on a team, reach out to your alumni!

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TLDR: ^Volunteer by clicking the link above^