These comments are unsorted, and may not be fully applicable or used moving forward. This reflects some of the leadership team's thoughts at the beginning of the semester.
Need to figure out a better way to plan budgets. We're growing a lot more and we need to be more organized about how we spend our money and how much we have left.
Need a better way to keep track of the things we need to take care of (trello or something might be appropriate). Especially if there are more people involved, we need a more organized way to do things. Maybe things can just be on the wiki, maybe not.
Students need to be taught a little more about project management and deadlines. We should figure out how to emphasize this more into the structure that we currently have.
Wiki needs to be re-organized
We should also have a mechanism to help students put this project on their resume - what position do they put, what descriptions do they put? Maybe we can have a frank discussion about this sometime.
We need more pictures of the projects and things. Should be filed in the drive/dropbox somewhere. We'll need to pull off a lot of the documents since they're not standalone atm.
Emphasis on being in the lab - just like in micromouse, it's important for people to be in the lab to talk to each other. A lot of perspective that people will get is from ad-hoc conversations in the lab…often students don't know how to ask the right questions yet, so being in the lab lets the answers come up naturally. They should ask each other questions!
Many students want to figure out what they're interested in and how to get there, especially for 296 students. We need to make sure that we fufill this need for students. As 296 students they should get a survey of things that they're interested in and then help them to move forward.
Not sure how to tackle 296 students during the off semesters. What happens to 296 students when they're done with their semester project? Do they stay or do they go?
Figure out how to open up the leadership planning - we should figure out how to open up the leadership things a little more. Our planning documents maybe should be public somewhere (for specific things) and the minutes can be continue to be closed up. This will help with our PR and documenting everything. Maybe we can figure out something where we can release our old planning documents.
Seriously consider how to make the workspace environment better - we will be at a very serious advantage if we structure our lab correctly and it's nice to work in. Having a room where it sounds and feels nice to be in will come a far way towards making it easier for people to integrate into the lab. A dedicated, nice meeting space will also help with this. We want to make people come in and say “wow”, this is kinda cool. We can use this stuff:
https://acousticalsolutions.com/
We should come up with a manifesto - write a manifesto or some sort of similar document that helps us document why the lab exists and what it exists for. See this for more details:
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.en.html
Consider the case if 396 students want to do a micromouse - if students want to do a micromouse for 396, I feel like we should let them do it. If they've done a 296 with us and agreed to stay on the project alongside micromouse it would be a great opportunity for them to switch to micromouse for a semester. It would be a good test of what they learned in our lab. My opinion is that they'll come back to our lab with a great new perspective.
We need a logo - need a logo to help advertise.
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Invest heavily in our space. - we should put as much money as possible into our space … it's the thing that will provide the most return on investment if we do it right. We're slowly becoming a more undergraduate focused lab and we can brand ourselves as that. We should look at what other labs are doing and slowly execute on that next semester. By the end of the semester, we will have a great looking lab that students will want to work at. We should get a new couch
Think about getting a new name - we've been the smart campus energy lab for a while, but that doesn't quite reflect the core of our lab. Think about what our lab is really focused on at the moment, and what we expect to become in the future. What's a name that will help us to focus our resolve and attract more excited students?
Make sure that students know what other projects are available to them: we should make sure that we tour students around to other labs and projects around the EE department. Make sure that through the course of their x96 they can discover what there is to do around the department and move towards what interests them. All 296 students should be treated as general enough - if they want to stay with us afterwards, great! If not we want them to do something they're more interested in! Make sure that our policy on this is extremely public.
Possibly outreach to other students regarding professional development - it might be beneficial for us to help develop a culture that helps students outside of the lab as well. This might help us to recruit younger students.
Mentorship training - mentors definitely need training on what to look and watch for, as well as how to handle situations. In general, mentors shouldn't feel like they're overwhelmed with work - the students should be taking the majority of the work on their hands, with some guidance from their mentors.
There might be away to help get educational grants - there might be a way to get educational grants for our lab, or to even to educational research. Jill is particularly interested in this field so it might be something that she is interested in as well. Dr. Kuh might be able to help us get more grants in this area as well… this is something that we can continue to work on after graduation.