Fernanda Dimbarre has worked for the SAFE Team since January 2023. 

She has gone from driving golf carts to picking up students’ calls, but she has also made memories with some of her best friends, whom she met while working there.

SAFE Team is a USF service funded by Student Government that offers free golf cart rides to students who don’t feel safe enough to walk around campus from 6:30 p.m. to 2 a.m. from Sunday to Thursday.

The service was founded in 1976, when it was just people escorting students to where they wanted to go, said Ian Blair-Catala, the SAFE Team director.

The team has 29 general field staff, who drive the carts, and nine dispatchers.

Dimbarre is a junior econometrics and quantitative economics and business analytics and information systems double major. She’s also a dispatcher for the SAFE Team.

She said she has many fun memories working there.

“When I was a driver, we would get cookies sometimes, we would listen to music, talk to the escorts,” she said. “I made a lot of friends with the people here in the office.”

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The SAFE Team escorted an average of 50 students per night in January, Blair-Catala said.

The senior chemistry major said one of the priorities at the SAFE Team office is to maintain a “positive vibe.”

“I want to make sure people on campus can be safe and the SAFE Team can get what it needs to properly do that,” he said.

Kimsing Lor transferred from Florida International University to USF in spring 2024. As a transfer student and an introvert, Lor said he worried about making friends. 

However, the junior artificial intelligence and business analytics major from Cambodia said he found a space where he could be more talkative at work for the SAFE Team. 

“If you see me on campus, I wouldn’t go up to anyone to make conversation, but being in the office opened up my experiences,” Lor said.

Nazmus Sakeeb, a sophomore computer science major, was also worried about making friends when he arrived at USF from Bangladesh in fall 2023.

Even though he believed he would eventually find friends, Sakeeb said he still had doubts.

“What if you don’t find people who have the same interests as you or think the same way as you? Are you gonna be able to vibe with them?” Sakeeb said.

Sakeeb said he applied to work for the SAFE Team because he saw the golf carts around campus and thought the radios and fluorescent jackets were “pretty cool.”

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Lor and Sakeeb started working for the SAFE Team last fall and ended up becoming not only co-pilots but also good friends.

Sakeeb said their first time working together was “pretty fun.”

“I remember getting into the office and I saw this guy who was pretty quiet at first,” Sakeeb said. “Then we hopped on the golf cart, started talking and it just exploded. It clicked.”

Lor said he would not have known Sakeeb because they have different majors. Despite that, the pair have a lot in common, such as their sense of humor, their love for anime and being from Asia, they said.

Their first time working together was “a bit awkward,” Lor said, but the pair quickly broke the ice by talking about their majors and bonding over music, which they play often when they work together.

“Our tastes differed, but his energy made it fun,” Lor said.

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Blair-Catala said it’s important for employees to have fun and make connections while also doing their best to ensure students’ safety.

“You want to make sure you have a good relationship with that person, or those five to seven hours aren’t going to be as fun and entertaining,” he said. “We try to make it as fun as possible, so when you’re working with people, they’re people you enjoy.”

Sakeeb said the best part about the job is getting to help people while driving golf carts.

“We get to see all kinds of people when we drive the golf cart,” he said. “We have passengers from all over the world. It makes us able to talk to people that we would never meet anywhere else.”

Sakeeb and Lor alternate between who drives and who sits in the passenger seat, but ultimately both have fun. 

“If you’re having a bad day, you come in the evening to the office, drive around the golf cart and it gives you a sense of peace,” Sakeeb said. “You relax a bit, and you forget you were having a bad day. You can just be yourself.”

To reach the SAFE Team, call 813-974-SAFE (7233).