All terms are 2 years with the opportunity for reelection for a total of 4 years.
We hold regular meetings throughout the year every couple months with increased regularity around Carnival. As an officer, attendance is not mandatory at every meeting so long as you continue to make an effort to support the mission and projects of the BAA.

Positions Available for Nomination:

President: The presidency is really what you make it, you are the point of contact with CMU Alumni Association staff and the Sweepstakes committee, and you provide the guidance and vision of the BAA as a whole. We have gone through periods of growth, and periods of stabilization, driven mostly on the confidence of the president in themselves and the BAA Board. At this point, there are a number of things that the BAA is expected to do every year, but there's also a single person in charge of each major point that isn't you. The president's main job in recent years is more one of creating new opportunities for Buggy as a whole, providing the tools and connections members of the committee need, then managing and guiding the committee direction. In an average month, I've spent no more than a few hours on tasks specific to the presidency, with a total of maybe 5 all in. Ramping up to raceday, it can get up to a few hours a week.

Being the president of a dedicated group of volunteers means that it is important to be comfortable finding compromises to solutions. On a related note, communication skills are also very important, as the president often represents the BAA to other groups. Lastly, the president should work hard to identify new avenues of growth for the BAA. During my term, I've tried to highlight creating a stable budget with the Buggy Endowed fund (spearheaded by Ben and our Lifetime Members, great success!), better integrate students, sweepstakes, and staff into BAA workflows (minus Raceday, also went even better than I had hoped!) and lastly to increase the appeal of the BAA to be more inclusive across organizations and roles (work in progress, with significant obstacles due to COVID). I encourage the future President to build their own direction, but would gladly provide somewhere to start and advice along the way!

Webmaster: The biggest responsibilities of Web Master are to make sure the site has the correct information prior to Carnival (events, dates, etc.), maintaining an updated leaderboard during Raceday, provide a working link to the livestream, and updating the site with the correct final results once races end. The more interesting work is in updating the website to fit today’s expectations. Projects are ongoing to maintenance the Gallery (especially for mobile), change out the current History format to a searchable database.

Communications: The primary responsibility for the Head of Communications is production of the Raceday Preview. This mostly involves generating text (team previews, introduction, etc), interviewing an alumni, and coordinating with other writers. Additionally, it would be useful to have InDesign skills, as that is how the Raceday Preview is currently laid out. However, we can work around that, other members of the BAA have stepped up to help out in the past. Due to the need for relatively current content in the Raceday Preview, a lot of work is in March and April in the run-up to Spring Carnival. However, this work can be spread out a bit over the Winter and Spring. Typical work is about 10 hours on the Raceday Preview text. In some years, we have also produced a Mini-Raceday newsletter, or a summer newsletter. This involves a little work, but is a good dry run for the Raceday Preview. This past term, the Communications officer has expanded to include other projects as well, including several assets for Buggy 100.

Reporting: The primary responsibilities are to compile, edit, or otherwise compose the weekly Rolls Report from my own observations at Rolls and those that I can solicit from local alumni. I then format the report (with images from the cmubuggy.org gallery) and post it to the BAA website. Unlike other members of the BAA Committee, the Rolls Report Lead's obligations don't spike as Raceday approaches. Instead, there are a steady 2-3 hours each week spent sending emails and compiling/writing the report. Of course, attending Rolls isn't included in that time estimate, if you're able to do that. The best candidate for the Reporting Officer is either local to Pittsburgh or has strong connections with students and alumni who are, in order to get the best on-the-scene scoops!