I would now like to share their list with you because 1, it makes me laugh, but 2, because these are little things we, as SA pros, don’t always stop and think about, but could make or break a student leader’s experience.

Top 25 things I wish someone would have told me about being a student leader…

As compiled by the Spring 2010 Burlington County College SGA and Club Officers

1. It is a lot of work, but don’t forget to have a good time!
2. Being a student leader is a large time commitment – it will be worth it in the end. The more you give, the more you get back.
3. You need a lot of dress clothes for meetings and events.
4. There is a lot of paperwork to be done. Be patient with the OSA’s (Office of Student Activities) processes and follow the guidelines.
5. You will meet tons of great people.
6. You are given so many opportunities and rewards – academically, personally and professionally.
7. The advisors are awesome resources and awesome people.  They want to see you succeed. Do not make any of them angry with you.
8. There is a Mt. Holly campus. You will have to go there for events. (one of our smaller locations with very specialized course offerings, but equipped with a beautiful event space)
9. You will get to go to the President’s house for a tree-trimming party. Be prepared to sing Christmas carols.
10. Network and build relationships!  Recruit EVERYONE! “The more the merrier” really applies to being involved with Student Activities and the people you meet will become your friends.
11. You will learn WAY more than you originally thought.
12. Get yourself organized from the get-go. Use your club’s office space to help! The best way to do this is to keep your club space clean!
13. Find a balance between being a student leader and class/family/work/friends/etc…
14. BE CREATIVE and don’t be afraid to try new things.
15. Give yourself way more time to plan things than you think you’ll need – you’ll need it.
16. There are people out there who want to join your club but don’t know about it yet – Tell them!
17. If you have a small club or inactive members, don’t underestimate a good co-sponsorship opportunity. You can’t do it alone – teamwork is imperative!
18. You will grow as a person.
19. Update your bulletin board often!
20. Market your meetings and events in ALL locations, and remember that fliers are not the end-all-be-all of advertising.
21. The OSA is a one-stop-shop for event planning resources.  Don’t take it all on yourself and never be afraid to ask for help!
22. The OSA and SGA offer student leadership development workshops – attend them!
23. Don’t doubt yourself or change your plans because a few people disagree.
24. Check your personal drama at the door.
25. Take the time to reflect on your experiences so you can do it even better the next time around.

Adrianne Dahms is a student activities specialist at Burlington County College, Pemberton, New Jersey.

A recent trip to Pasco-Hernando Community College’s West Campus not only had the normal friction between the two groups, but the campus was also set up in a way that had the two groups literally divided by a river.

Spatial layout of a campus can play a major role in either hurting or promoting cooperation. At my Alma Mater, the student activities office was tucked far away in a corner of the campus and it was a real challenge to either make faculty aware we existed or how to find us.

What’s the layout like on your campus? Does it help or hurt your cooperation with Faculty?

It makes sense at first glance.  Wondering what to program on campus?  Ask your students!  Brilliant.  And wrong.

Here’s the problem with surveying your students in order to plan your programs:  They don’t know what they don’t know.

The vast majority of the students on any campus are blissfully unaware of the universe of student activities programs that are available.  They don’t attend APCA and NACA conferences.  They don’t read Student Activities Journal, Programming  or Campus Activities magazines.  They don’t even read this blog.

They essentially have no idea of what’s available in the marketplace.  They don’t know what they don’t know.

Ask them what bands to book, they’ll tell you "My Morning Jacket" or "Fall Out Boy."  If you ask about comedy, they’ll tell you Chris Rock or Dane Cook.  Odds are, your campus can’t afford those acts.  Or at least not all of them.  So you haven’t gained much from your survey.

But more importantly,  my original premise:   They don’t know what they don’t know. 

Ask your students:  would you like to stick your hands in different colors of hot, molten wax?  Really?

Yet we’ve all seen students at conferences line up for hours, waiting to produce their very own "Wax Hands."

Ask your students:  would you like to see a ventriloquist?  Really?

Many students may not even know what the word means.  Yet we’ve all seen students rolling in laughter over Dan Horn, Jeff Dunham, or Taylor Mason.

I often liken entertainment surveys to asking children about dinner.  If you ask the average child what he or she wants for dinner, they’ll tell you what they know:  they want a Happy Meal.  And if that’s what you always give them, they never learn to appreciate more exotic food like broccoli or sushi.  Don’t we all know college students whose diet consists of burgers and chicken strips– because it’s the only food they learned to like?

Take your co-curricular duties to heart.  Remember that you serve an important teaching function on your campus.  Avoid a regular diet of "Happy Meals" for your students.  Book some unusual programs, events that aren’t even on the students’ radar.  Your students– and your campus– will be better for it.

In very short, Yahoo is planning to release an “all-in-one” messaging service for cell phones. This will include text messaging, instant messaging, email, and . . . oh yes, facebook.

And not just any method messaging – it will also include something that is called “Pulse” which includes Facebook status and . . . hard to tell from the screen shot. . . perhaps feeds from other services that know where you are, and perhaps some full fledged geolocation (if the phone has GPS or uses something else) .

Even if Yahoo doesn’t get it right, the iPhone is soon to allow anyone to develop software on it (and you can be sure there will be aggregation services, IM’s and facebook integrations) and other cell phone makers are catching up rapidly. (Don’t think the iPhone type functionality is only for geeks, if it follows the RAZR price curve, there will be free versions with plans sometime next year.)

So the question for Student Affairs professionals: as students increase their connectedness by communicating on the fly through multiple methods on their cell phones, and, as they expose their own whereabouts and activities to their friends, will Student Affairs plug in to this? Can/Will/Should Student Affairs be a “friend”?

Before the jump to personal / professional separation kicks in, keep in mind students look at this differently. Much of their communication is limited to friends (as defined by facebook behavioral norms) it’s kind of a “you’re in or you’re out” sort of thing.

Email, at the moment, is the preferred communication method for universities as it’s established and easy. It’s a recognized problem that students don’t check email (especially official school email) and we can expect email use to decrease further compared to other channels that are getting increasingly convenient, mobile, and socially driven.

What about assessment?

How convenient to track GPS to figure out who went to what in orientation. What if the students didn’t care? What if they actively published their location and status information to their friends and were fine with letting the university follow their digital foot prints?

Sound far fetched? Not so much.

Well anyways. Here it comes. And here come the issues:

Communication Needs
Unexpected Consequences
Context
Privacy vs. Transparency
Assessment vs. Invasion [Note: Context switch ; )]
FERPA (signed and written consent! sign a cell phone?) and lawywers (duty of care) [Note: This link is sarcastic.]

Good times!

A recently added post on The Chronicle of Higher Education website discussed the opinion of a few faculty members on the effectiveness (or in their view, lack of effectiveness) of student programming. In fact, they were not only making the case that student programming is not effective, but it is counter productive, and hurts, their classroom work:

[H]alf my time is spent unraveling the messages, axioms, and truisms of the diversity trainer when students must confront, again intellectually, difference, power, and oppression. Some conundrums cannot be ended with a group hug, unfortunately.

The biggest voice of opposition, or citation, for the post is blogger, Oso Raro. I’m not completely clear if O.R. is blaming the problems on the type and quality of student programming or the gap between faculty and student activities. This quote tends to lean toward the latter:

[T]he Student Life professional represents a new cadre in the academy, one imbued with considerable power and influence over the structuring of students’ social lives and, consequently, some of their relationship to the dynamics of the classroom.

O.R. seems to think there is a power struggle between the two sides and student affairs is sided with the administration:

They are a competing power centre in the institution, and they tend to be allied directly or indirectly with the concerns of administration..

The belief in a limited pie that everyone is grabbing at is dangerous in education. In the end, the goal should be 100% focus on the growth of the students. It does sound hookie to say win-win, and to increase the size of the pie, but that’s the ideal situation.

O.R. makes a great point about how student affairs rarely reaches out to the enormous amount of faculty knowledge and experience:

Parallel Programming— At a former institution there was quite a strong student centre for LGBT students, run by an efficient and well-organised Student Life professional who was also gay. However, any connection or co-programming between faculty who taught in these areas and the student centre were practically non-existent. In fact, there seemed to be a mild antipathy between faculty and Student Life around any co-programming. Once, I met with the Student Life professional who ran the student centre to offer my help in whatever events my presence could be relevant. The Student Life professional was courteous but guarded, declaring at one point that attempts to connect faculty to programming had been met in the past with disinterest, and hence dropped. So, this incredible social resource for students was effectively divorced from whatever might be going on in their classrooms. This same Student Life professional later directed a disgruntled student in my class to the Dean, bypassing both either a conversation with me or with my chair (and therefore university policy as well), underlining an open antagonism towards faculty that I found bothersome at the time, but had I been more vulnerable would have been much more dangerous.

How often do you dip into your faculty to run a diversity training or leadership retreat? I don’t think the problem is student activities programming, or lack of faculty interest, but instead the real problem is the gap between the two parties.

Student activities should extend the branch first and invite the faculty to take part in events. This will not only allow us to utilize their skills and save money, but it will also get greater understanding from faculty that we are all working together for the same cause.

The article cites another blogger, Jonathan Sterne of Super Bon!, who reiterates the missed opportunities from the gap:

[P]rogressive faculty probably have a whole group of allies in this other wing of the university of whom we don’t even know to avail ourselves. Having once worked in academic advising, I, at least, should know better.

So think about your upcoming events and retreats, and think about how you can include faculty members beyond hoping they give extra credit to their class for attending an event.
———————–
Update – Take the time to read the comments under O.R.’s post. They are fantastic!

Ashley captured these for you, and I wanted to make sure they got posted.  If you weren’t there, then some of the ideas may sound odd (or make no sense at all).  If that’s the case, drop me a note and I’ll explain it to you.

Fifty Ninety-One Ideas in Fifty Minutes

1. Grocery
   Bingo

2. Medallian
   Hunt

3. Life-Size
   Monopoly

4. Game
   Hunting

5. Pot
   Luck Dinner

6. Video
   Gaming

7. Iron
   Chef Dorm Room/Ramen Noodle cook-off

8. Game
   Show Contest

9. Poetry
   Slam

10. Day
    of the Dead

11. Dark
    Side of Oz (Pink Floyd & film)

12. Walk-in
    movie

13. Dive-in
    movie(pool)

14. American
    Idol

15. Talent
    Show

16. Bed
    Race

17. Bean
    Bag Toss

18. Themed
    Dances

19. Halloween
    Contests

20. Live
    Haunted House

21. Campus Ghost
    tours

22. Halloween
    Casino

23. Recycle
    plastic bottles into planters (Arbor day)

24. Leadership
    retreats

25. Water
    World  (slip ‘n slide)

26. Movie
    on the Lawn

27. Bonfire
    & S’mores

28. Themed
    movies

29. Stress-Free
    Spa Day

30. Chair
    Massages

31. Oreo
    Stacking (Guinness Records)

32. Star
    Gazing (astronomy club)

33. Leap
    Frog

34. Twister

35. Reflective
    Movies

36. Commit a Random Act of Kindness

37. Family
    Fest

38. Canned
    Food  Sculptures

39. Food
    Bank Drive

40. Frozen
    turkey bowling

41. Campus Fear
    Factor

42. Photos
    with Christmas mascot

43. Easter
    Bunny Pictures

44. Dogoween (pet costume contest at Halloween)

45. Scavenger
    Picture Hunt

46. Campus
    Idol

47. Parking
    space lottery

48. Campus
    Safety (self-defense)

49. Sleep-out

50. T-Shirt
    relocation (collect rival school T-shirts and take to Salvation Army in another city!)

51. Clothesline
    project

52. Women’s
    forum

53. Cultural
    showcases

54. “Get Into Your Genes”;
    Too small Blue Jean give away

55. Campaign
    for real beauty (acceptance of normal bodies)

56. Mary
    Kay (or Avon) day

57. Financial
    Education

58. Monster.com
    (Free financial planning)

59. “Girls”
    or “Guys” Night out

60. $2
    Movies in town

61. Mock
    weddings

62. YouTube
    Contest

63. Hillbilly
    Olympics

64. Human
    auction

65. Mentoring

66. Study
    night with pizza

67. Midnight
    Breakfast   

68. President
    for a day

69. Parking
    ticket raffle (pay your fines)

70. Pre-release
    movies

71. Unhomecoming
    Faculty King and Queen

72. Kiss
    the Pig (Spam loaf)

73. Pageant
    and formal dinner auction

74. Pie
    a professor

75. Hot
    topic lunch

76. Glow
    in the dark easter egg hunt

77. Pie
    your RA

78. Recycle
    drive with prize

79. “Big
    dog on Campus” Fun Olympics (Bulldog is school mascot…)

80. Cinderella
    project (Prom Dresses for high school girls)

81. Graffiti
    party

82. Change
    drive into mosaic

83. Car
    show

84. Speed
    dating ideas

85. Cow
    patty bingo

86. Mardi
    Gras Sidewalk Parade

87. Art
    festival/contest

88. Nametag
    Day (everybody wears a name tag)

89. Parking
    lot sale (like rummage sale)

90. Pumpkin
    Carving Contest

91. Holiday Window
    Decorating

To curtail the imbalance and to seize the opportunity:

The college’s Associated Student Government hosted its first “Coffeehouse Night” last month, during which students heading to class in the twilight were treated to coffee, cookies and the sounds of an acoustic guitar, as played by a fellow student.

“People drop by, grab a cup of coffee and listen for a little,” said Jesse Lyn, student government president. “Many night students come straight from work, so they need an opportunity to unwind before class.”

More than 100 students stopped by within the first hour of the event and were “thrilled” by the break from class, Lyn said

Commuter campuses, like Palomar, are known for their large percentage of evening or non-traditional students. Sherry Titus, interim director for student affairs, said:

“They get here after work, take a class and get home to get dinner
started,” she said. “They have no buy-in (to the college) besides the
educational one.”

Coffeehouse events give these students an
opportunity to become a part of the Palomar community, even if it’s
just for a few moments, Titus said. Students are entertained by their
peers or can use the venue to showcase their own talents, including
music, poetry and dance, she said.

So don’t forget about your night time students. How are you servicing them with the same student activities fees that everyone else is paying?

Today, they posted a thoughtful, plaintive response from a UK lecturer. The full post is worth reading – a few of my favorite peices:

What is it like being a lecturer today?

66% of my students

Bother to come to the lectures

I spend all Sunday carefully preparing.

I spent five days researching and preparing.

A carefully considered reading list

Of which my students read

20% of the items.

I spent the summer

Creating an online learning environment

Full of amazing study resources

That only 30% of my students visit

And she ends simply:

Of what school teachers earn

I spent 5 years writing my last book

Which was well reviewed

And got me interviewed on TV

But I only made £50 in royalties

So you have to ask

Why I do this job?

And my answer is

Because I believe

all that stands between civilization and barbarism

is education.

Students Today” suggests that students are dissatisfied. This lecturer’s response answers in kind.

Chicken and egg?

I love learning. From books, from experiences and most of all from people. I think this is normal.

I had trouble with my engagement while in formal education settings. This is common.

I’ve been both the bored student and the frustrated lecturer.

That their is so much annoyance on both “sides” seems a little pathetic. We can do better.

In this conversation about education reform the frustration can be a motivator initially. Over time it’s hard not to become overwhelmed, by the sheer size of the idea of education reform, or the pace of change, or the politics of any given institution.

I think communities are the solution. A combination of blogs like this, conferences, and even Facebook groups, to get like minded people to break down this frustration into small task lists. Small steps with a bigger vision in mind.

The Network page can be a very powerful tool, but the Facebook interface does not allow the Network page to reach it’s full potential.  The reason?  The only way to access your network is by clicking the network link at the top of the page.


It doesn’t really jump out at you.   I think it would be a lot more effective if the News Feed dedicated a portion of the page to list Network Activity.

So what does the Network Page do?

• The Networks page lists
• Shows all the upcoming events in your network.
• Shows all the recently posted items in your network.
• Shows all the recently active groups among members of your network.
• Shows all the items in your networks marketplace
• Shows network statistics such as top music, movies, and Interests, TV shows, Books, and also displays percentages such as sex, political views, and relationship status
  .
• Shows nearby Networks
• Provides a discussion board and a wall.

So what can I do with all this?

Let’s start with the groups. 

While searching through the active groups in your network you may stumble upon one titled Fall 2007 Freshmen, or something of the sort.  This is a great place to promote, and Recruit.  Tom recently posted a blog discussing this The Strange Power of the Go Getter Freshmen.

There may be other great active groups in your network you can promote with.  Take a look, just don’t over advertise, because nobody likes spam, and overuse of these groups will begin to look like spam.

Let’s move on to the people in your network. 

Near the top of the Network page six random members of your network will be displayed.  Above these six members will display how many people are in your network, and a couple links to search or browse within your network.  I don’t see much use with the browse feature, as it only displays ten random people in your network.

Click the search link, and then continue on and click the advanced link.  I’m sure you have seen the advanced page before, but have you ever used it for student affairs networking?  The advanced search page allows you to search within every portion of a Facebook profile.  From the basic info to contact info, personal info, education info, and work info.  If you are looking for any particular characteristic to promote, or recruit  from you can easily search it from here.

Have you ever wondered which staff and faculty members have signed up for Facebook?  Well it’s fairly easy to find out.  Scroll down till you see education info, and in the school status drop down menu you will see staff, and faculty.  select whichever one you would like to search, and click the advanced search button at the bottom of the page

What do your students like to do? what are their interests?  Sounds like you need to put out another survey.  No not at all, Facebook already did the Assessment for you!!  Check the Network Statistics page and you may find what you are looking for.  The best part is you can click each particular interest and get a list of the people who have added that interest to their profile.

How can you use this?  Look at each category, is there something that jumps out at you that you can create an event about?  perhaps if there is a particular type of music that is popular you can have a dance focusing on that type of music.  Maybe under interests you see a sport such as ultimate frisbee, why not host a tournament.  Look under the movies category, why not play one of the top movies for your students?  Be creative, and you can put together a great event.

Does anyone else have any networking, promotional or recruiting tips or tricks that they use with Facebook?

So what do you do to get a quick message out to all your incoming freshmen?

You could try to friend them all, but this would take forever . . .

At every school on our fall tour there has been a “Class of 2011″ group on Facebook.

Just like this one:

This particular freshmen group has 239 members (roughly 70% of the entire freshmen class – it’s a small school):

What do they talk about? Well, all kinds of stuff. Sure, there is party talk, but there are also bright spots, such as random peer tech support:

And students taking student activities organization into their own hands:

The activity on these groups, it’s possibilities and limitations, deserves its own post.

For the moment, I want to focus on this person:

Because of the way Facebook works, the creator of the group can message everyone in the group through Facebook. That means that this person, this one, random freshman who happened to start the “class of 2011″ group at their school first, is the only person who can message most of the freshmen through the medium they use most.

This one person has their finger on probably the most effective communication delivery mechanism currently available to schools.

This is hilarious.

In a non-scientific sampling, these folks are diverse. Sometimes they are geeks/ computerish folks. Sometimes they just got accepted early to the school and happened to be bored one night.

I think that you as an activities advisor should makes friends with this person.

Of course, you could perhaps talk them into spamming everyone for the school, but that wouldn’t do that kid any favors. Being a stooge is no good for anyone’s rep.

Some creativity is needed. Maybe that kid becomes the editor of the once a month freshmen news letter? And you as the activities department get a good shot at including your info . . .

Point is, if you use the student to spam the group he or she created, you will make everyone look bad.

If you can empower the student to see the power they have (most don’t realize it) and make positive use of it, then the student can be pulled into the student leadership position and everyone wins.

Either way, at every campus across the country, there is one person that can Facebook the majority of their class. This is a strange power lying dormant.