August Newsletter

Welcome to the first installment of the Raider Aerospace Society (RAS) Newsletter. We will be presenting a newsletter once every month to present the progress of the overall organization or do an in-depth look into one of the projects within the organization. This newsletter is here for you to stay up to date with everything RAS and to see where we are spending our money as an organization. 

This month, we will be looking at the organization’s progress over the month of August. This month was spent preparing for the upcoming Fall 2020 semester with a focus on recruitment and public relations. We have been working on recruitment by signing up for two of the virtual events to recruit for our Fall 2020 RAS Kickoff on September 11th. We have placed an emphasis on reaching out to majors differing from the traditional mechanical engineering. We have reached out to the Art, Business, Marketing, and Electrical Engineering departments to schedule times to attend their classes and give a short recruitment presentation. With this new outreach strategy, we are hoping to bring in differing engineers to help with the electrical side of our projects and people to bolster our administrative team.  

With the bolstering of our administrative team, we are hoping to use that to increase our public relations substantially for the following academic year. Our goals are to keep our sponsors, alumni, family, and friends updated with the most recent news regarding RAS. We are attempting to do this by providing monthly newsletters to all interested parties and posting at least once a week on a social media platform. 

We are also planning on increasing our presence on one social media platform specifically, YouTube. We are going to be adapting to the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic by attempting to educate our members using online videos. These educational videos will cover fundamental concepts for rockets and planes, tutorials on how to use software pertinent to RAS related projects, and one build series for both Space Raiders and Pegasus. We hope that these videos will be great educational resources for members to use for this year and future years. This should give members, alumni, sponsors, friends, and family the opportunity to see how we are conducting our projects. 

In conclusion, RAS is adapting to the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic by diversifying recruitment strategies, increasing our public relations presence, and focusing on virtual education. We hope that these changes will help not just the survivability of RAS for this year, but the sustainability of the RAS for years to come.