Make College Better

Many of us are involved on campus, in a charity project, club sport, entertainment group, or any other type of student organization. Odds are if you find yourself on this blog you are ambitious and like to take command of your life, which means you might be interested in one day heading up that student org you just joined. The following 5 steps will help make sure that you are able to rise to the top and leave your mark on campus.

1. Find your passion

Being a student leader takes work and time. If you are not passionate about what you are doing, you won’t enjoy this time. And further, if you aren’t passionate about what you are doing, you’ll likely half ass it. You need to find your passion. What issues keep you up at night? What wrongs do you see that you want to right? What do you want to spend the rest of your life doing? If you can answer these questions, find a group of other like minded people. If that group doesn’t exist yet, start it yourself.

2. Invest yourself fully in one thing, and do it well

Many people make the mistake of joining too many things. Your Freshman year, it may be a good idea to test the waters and see what you like. However, after this you really need to limit the number of organizations you are involved in. If you are involved in too many, the meetings will start conflicting. Miss a couple meetings, and the powers that be won’t see you as the kind of person ready to inherit a leadership position. If you only join one or two organizations, you will have the time and energy to devote yourself fully to these causes. Simply showing up at the meetings is not enough, if you want to be a leader of an organization you need to spend time outside of the club making contacts, working on project, advertising, etc. This means you simply don’t have the time to both do lots of things and do them well. Find one thing you want to do, and take it by storm.

3. Do it for the right reasons

Many people join student organizations as a résumé booster.  However, if this is your motivation, you will not soon find yourself in a position of leadership.  The current leaders (the ones who make the decisions on future leadership positions) can easily tell who cares about the organization and who is looking for a quick addition to the résumé to help them get into med school.  Also, if you are just looking to add a title in front of your name, you probably won’t enjoy what you are doing.  Is it worth all the meetings, time, and energy if you don’t even enjoy it?  You NEED to be doing it for the right reasons.  If you are truly dedicated, the rest will fall into place.  Your sincere dedication will be noted, and you will soon find yourself naturally fitting into a leadership role.

4. Take on additional responsibilities

You don’t have be in an official position of leadership to take initiative and be a leader.  If people are asking for extra help, even if it is not one of your responsibilities, help them out.  Also, find new areas of improvement that no one has taken the initiative on and start them up yourself.  This kind of tenacity and dedication will show that you are ready to be a leader in the future.

5. Make friends at the top

This one is the most ‘political’ but it is certainly true, so I had to add it.  You need the current leaders to know who you are if you are going to inherit their position.  Say hi at meetings, don’t be intimidated, feel comfortable emailing or calling them to discuss current projects.  Get to know who they are and what they want to do with their lives.  This may sound like sucking up (hell, it might even be sucking up) but its OK!  If you are doing it because you really care about the cause, and just want to put yourself on the radar so that you can have a leadership role in the future, that’s perfectly legitimate.  Also, student leaders who are dedicated to a good cause are usually pretty nice, caring people.  Who wouldn’t want to be there friend?  You need to make them notice you as a person so they can notice all the incredible work you are doing, especially if you are a freshman in a larger organization.

Being involved in a student organization is a very rewarding and extremely worthy thing to do.  If you want to play an even larger role, I hope these 5 tips will help you do it.  Have an extra tip?  We’d love to read it in the comments.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 27th, 2007 at 10:34 am and is filed under School Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.