Secretary

The secretary is a person elected who is two steps below the President, and is perhaps one of the three highly regarded positions.

Job Requirements

The job requirements of the secretary are to:

Coordinate with mentors and other executives to set meeting dates
Record notes during executive meetings
Communicate information to members/parents to inform of events or meetings or whatever else

Coordination with Mentors

What does it mean? Pretty much that the secretary has to ensure that a meeting day is set and there is confusion about when it is, where it will be, and what will be going on that day.

Record Notes during Meetings

Some things - like information other than meeting dates - need to be recorded for future use and/or for use in a email or something like that would be sent to members, parents, or sponsors. What would this be? If the team organized a group to manage a presentation to sponsors and a member of the club needs to know who was on that group later, that member can only figure that out if someone wrote it down. Ideally, that person would be the secretary.

Communication

Emails sent out to members, parents, and possibly even sponsors should be concise (look it up). A team member should be able to read the email, figure out what it is about, and quickly get the information they need. An example email which a secretary would write can be seen below:

Hi all,

We will be having a meeting in Mrs. Rutland's room (D214) on Thursday (1/18) at 2:30 PM. The meeting will end around 4:00 PM. In this meeting we will work on designing the manipulator for this year's FRC game and break into groups later to work on the drivetrain.

If you have not seen the game for this year, you can view it here: http://www.usfirst.org

Keep in touch with members, by joining our forum. There you can communicate with members out of meetings and discuss ideas freely any time. You can find the forum here: http://www.prhsrobotics.com/forum

Cheers
-John Doe

As you can see the email gets to the point quickly, giving members important information such as location, date, and times quickly in the first sentence, while also giving members extra information for those who are not "in the know." In the following paragraphs, the secretary also add information which could be overall useful to a member - this year's game, and a promotion of this forum.

Emails containing information to members and parents should be sent at reasonable times. If there is a meeting tomorrow, a email should not be sent out after sun down as most people will not check their email then. A opportune time to send a email for a meeting for tomorrow would be in the morning of the day before or a few days in advance. Sending a email late is only excusable in situations of emergency meetings.

Conclusion

Overall, the job as a secretary is not limited to what was listed above, but that is in a general way what it is. Being a secretary is knowing information and being able to share it with others reliably and in a good manner. If a member needs to know what the team did last week, what's Johnny's phone number, or who is designing the super-secret rocket engine drivetrain, the member should be able to get it from the secretary.

Previous Secretaries