Hi. If you are a frequent reader of TechNews, you likely recognize my name. I have had the pleasure of running TechNews alongside the Editor-in-Chief, Kris Shiflet. In my time at TechNews, I am proud to have been a part of a monumental turnover. Just a year ago, when I was just business manager, TechNews was struggling to reach the minimum articles necessary to publish weekly. In fact, for one week, we had so few articles, we had to decide to not publish at all! Last semester, I made it a goal to change this, and that effort paid off well. We had gone from weekly four-page issues to regular eight and 12-page issues, and this semester seems promising to continue that trend.
If you were particularly involved in the Student Government Association (SGA), especially during 2022, you might recognize my name for a different reason. During that time, I was a senator, before becoming the Vice President of Campus Life. In that time, with the help of many people, I helped turn around SGA from its post-pandemic state, with low attendance struggling to meet quorum, to a three-year high on attendance and a good foundation. I am not the best student org leader by any means, but I do think I might have something valuable to pass on to the next generation of student org leaders.
My philosophy is actually based very heavily on pedagogical research. This research is based on discovering and proving effective practices for teachers, and is a focus of mine as a Master’s student in secondary education. I won’t be citing any paper in particular, so this is more of a synthesis of the last few years in my program at National Louis University.
Perspective, patience, and forgiveness. Those are the three words I think that are most important for a student organization leaders to internalize. In order to run a successful student organization, one that can maintain its current membership, organize effective GBMs, and even increase its student base, I think patience and forgiveness are the two more important qualities to exhibit. And this is because of one important fact: your membership are busy people too.
I’d like to start with the first word in that list, perspective. This is especially important if you are facing low attendance at events or GBMs. Who is your audience? And, what reason do they have to come to your events? As a student org leader, you inherently have a different perspective on your student organization. You are going to be more enthusiastic and want to attend your events more than the average student, that’s why you are a student org leader. The average student doesn’t have that attachment you do, so you need to be able to put yourself in their shoes. Are there any obstacles (e.g., classes, other major events, etc) that might prevent a student from attending your events? Is there a good reason for a student to take some time out of their busy day to come to your event? Providing reasons, and more importantly, communicating those reasons, is a great first step to energizing your current membership.
Patience is likewise important. Members of your student organization are not as well informed on the policies and procedures that your student organization follows or has to follow. Students will regularly want to do things their own way, forget deadlines, or break rules. And following from the logical of the previous paragraph, it’s not hard to see why. They have hundreds if not thousands of other rules and deadlines to remember, many of which they place more importance on for a variety of reasons. As a student org leader, I think its most important to be as flexible as you can, within your own sanity. Strict enforcement of deadlines can be a surefire way to make org members feel bad about themselves, and potentially alienate them from the student organizations.
This line of logic extends to forgiveness as well. As I hinted at previously, students may unintentionally break rules and procedures that your organization places on them. You may have told them these rules dozens of times before, and as an organization leader, it may be tempting to take the easy way out and strictly enforce these rules (or, inversely, not enforce the rules at all). I believe taking either of these paths will be detrimental to the health of a student organization. Rules are purposeful mechanisms, meant to promote certain values of an organization. If you strictly enforce rules without considering the contexts in which they were broken, are you really promoting the values of your organization, or are you simply enforcing rules for rule’s sake? Students who may break a rule or procedure unintentionally may not have any intent to counter the values of your organization, and punishing them may only serve to restrict your membership. However, no enforcement of rules and procedures also hurts a student org. Again, rules and procedures exist to promote the values of an organization. There may be times when students go against these rules and procedures not out of neglect, but because they have little regard for those values. In these instances, you might have to make the hard decision to do something. But even in these cases, those actions should be made with the ideas of forgiveness in mind. Punishment should be purposeful, carefully constructed, and mindfully applied.
There are many more facets of running student organizations that are also important, but I believe with these three guiding principles, most of the other concepts could be reconstructed. The way in which these principles are applied will, of course, vary from student org to student org, and if you are a student org leader for long enough, you will end up doing something that you later come to regret. In these instances, it’s important to stop, reevaluate what it is you intend to accomplish through your organization, and keep an open mind. Do this enough, and you might just find your organization a little stronger than when you first started.