When I was not studying or working while in school, I spent a bunch of time in a few student groups.
They’re environments unlike any other - stakes can be either soul-crushingly high or nonexistent, some people devote their lives to them while others let them become stagnant, they are volunteer organizations, and they both reflect bits of the real world while also living in a bubble.
Below you can find summaries of my involvement in a few organizations!
My final student group position was being President of the IEEE chapter at UC - our website can be found here. I came in with a clear platform with two areas of focus:
Events: Being a part of other student groups made me realize the most successful groups had a “thing” - some kind of defining event they revolved around. I felt IEEE was lacking this, and lacking events in general. To this end, we had more speakers and talks (including a talk I gave on Keras, the materials are located here). To try to establish an event with an identity, I started up a hackathon partnered with ACM that we called MakeUC. The goal of this hackathon was to promote integration of hardware and software, knowledge which often gets silo’d into specific people or groups. To further this goal, we bought 13 Arduino kits for hackers to use, which included a whole slew of random hardware (speakers, wheels, motors, breakout boards, screens, resistors, etc.). The hackathon was a great time - we had about 50 people attend. I look forward to seeing where it goes in the future!
Marketing: I felt IEEE also struggled with an identity in the eyes of the students because it did not have a terrible amount of marketing. For this area, we amped up the marketing effort by attending fairs and putting up fliers. At the end of the year, I had the idea of starting up a student magazine, which I talk about extensively here. This magazine ended up being one of the things I was most proud of coming out of college. While not directly related to marketing, the magazine is an extremely high-visibility initiative for the students, which helps solidify what IEEE is.
Halfway through the year, I realized that there was one more thing that IEEE was lacking. Therefore, there was one more area of focus for us heading into the second semester:
The CEAS Tribunal can be thought of as the Engineering-specific Student Government (every college has a Tribunal). This group is unique on our campus and nationally as they run the career fair, a huge event attracting more than 2,000 students every semester. Because of this, the group is quite large and can afford a large number of other events to benefit the student body.
I was able to serve as Technology chair, where I made small updates to the website, which uses drupal with a custom theme as a backend. My larger objective was an overhaul to the career fair sign-in page. When students come to the fair, they sign-in on some old laptops we have. Because so many students come, the page needs to be fast, and fault-tolerant. I’m happy to say the new page I created works extremely well and saves the data entered. Additionally, I also made an RSVP page so that students can sign up before coming to the fair, streamlining the process further.
I also served as Chief of Staff, which is a kind of VP-level position. The position was new, so a lot of what I did was trying to figure out the identity of what it would do. Honestly, I did not do a whole lot! I tried a few projects, but they never really panned out. This experience was invaluable as it was my first time really trying to “manage” other people. I got to see the management point of view early on, and fail at it, which I’ve grown from.
Student Government at the University of Cincinnati consists of a Senate, President/Vice President, Cabinet, and more, modeled after the U.S. government. There are various committees for differing tasks such as Sustainability, and I served on the Campus Life Committee for 3 years.
Campus Life was committed to improving the student experience at the University, mainly by hosting various events. I like to think of it as the “soul” of Student Government, a place to really get any cool project off the ground. During my time I assisted with various projects and created my own, called Staff Appreciation. Our goal was to say “thanks” to all the service staff at the University. To do this, we got 400 cards and got students to hand write thank you notes to each staff member individually. The event itself consisted of distributing the cards, and we partnered with the University to also have some food/fun activities.
In addition, my main goal was also to separate a process called “Co-Sponsorship” from the committee. The process was used to allocate about $5,000 each year from Student Government to new/relatively new events to help them get off the ground. These events could be anything that was open to the student body and that we felt was good for the students. My view, however, was that while the process was great, it didn’t really belong in the committee itself. Therefore, I spent a bunch of time as chair of Campus Life to create a new committee, called Co-Sponsorship Committee. The bill was eventually passed, allowing both committees to better serve their purpose.
I talk about these campaigns on my website page in more detail, but I have been a part of two student government President/Vice President campaigns.
During these two-week sprints, students put their lives on the line for their classmates. It’s an extremely stressful experience putting up posters, standing on the street, and making speeches, especially considering it usually happens in mid-February (10-30 degree Fahrenheit weather).
They’re some of my favorite memories in college as they build a large sense of camaraderie within the group. I’m so thankful to have been a part of both (and that we won both times)!