Things I learnt about founding & leading a university society
Back when I was an undergraduate student, I founded a society (Science Connection; University College London (UCL) SciCon https://www.uclscicon.com/) with a few other students at UCL and was president of SciCon for two years. The society was founded to build bridges between the scientific research community at the university and undergraduate students within it. Before founding the society, I had no prior experience of working in a student society, let alone a leading role. There were many times when I wondered how to be a good leader, how to be better at managing people and how to make things work more efficiently without intimidating anyone at the same time. It was all very tricky for me. I read a few articles about how to run a business/company and borrowed some ideas from them but, hey look, they are still inherently different to running a university society.
Here I am writing down a few points I learnt when I was running a society; I hope this will be useful for people who are running one or planning to start one:
Finding people
If you want to start a society you will likely require a team of people to work WITH (not a team of people who work FOR you!), not only for their support but also to obtain ideas from people with different experiences and backgrounds. You may ask your friends to join, but I highly recommend approaching people you do not know yet. What you can do is to put your ideas on a university or departmental forum, or ask your departmental tutor to share the message for you, and wait for the responses. Those who approach you are likely the ones that are the most passionate about your ideas.
In my case, at the time I had some ideas to start a society, I posted my ideas on the departmental forum and a few replied. Interestingly when the society was finally launched, all the people who I ended up working with are those who replied to my posts, that is, I did not know any of them beforehand. Another interesting fact: in the end, nothing on the original post was carried out. Almost all the event ideas were from the others, and I was responsible for writing plans to bring their ideas to life — and it worked great!
Ideation — sharing ideas
When I was running the society, I found that people are often reluctant to share their ideas, they probably thought their ideas are dumb or aren’t original enough and thus not confident to express their potentially neat ideas. What I found to be useful, especially in the starting phase of the society, is to have a few brainstorming sessions to put down ideas on paper, and then you can go further from there. It is also useful to have a Google Doc available online so people can jot down their ideas whenever they get one.
Besides this, not only for running a society but in general, I highly recommend keeping a notebook where you can keep any ideas that come up in your mind. One thing I learnt over my four years at university was that our brain is there to think and generate ideas — but not to store ideas, and we forget things more easily and quickly than we think!
Write plans — be as specific as possible
After the ideation phase, I recommend you write down a plan for how you want to carry it out. It is fine if you are not sure how this will turn out — just write and be as specific as possible. After that, you will be able to evaluate the practicality of the idea, which would lead to actual execution.
It is not a job
This is obvious, but easily forgettable especially if you are leading a society: it is not a job! Being involved in a university society and taking up a role might be one way for many university students to experience working in an organization and learn to be responsible for groups of people, such as other committee members or the “customers” (people who come to your events, for example).
Though it’s true, you must realize that committee members in the society are likely to have other priorities, so don’t assume that they are putting the society as the “main” thing, or you might be greatly frustrated. Therefore, assign just the right amount of tasks to each person in the society. Set deadlines. Make people report to the group when jobs are done. Make it clear in the beginning that if someone struggles to finish their part, for example, due to unexpected course work, let the group know, so, another person can pick up the task to prevent delay in delivering the consecutive tasks.
Have multiple people work on one project
What would also help is to assign two people for each job to work together, so they have someone else to discuss when they are not sure what to do or not confident enough to make decisions and need someone to back them up. It will make the process of completing a task more fun, and they are less likely to come to you for questions just because they are afraid to make mistakes. In this way, it increases the likelihood of the tasks being done on time, and the quality of the work is likely to be better as well. You can avoid micro-managing the group with this strategy too. Personally, I agree with the saying “two heads are better than one”.
Keep yourself free
This is what I learnt much later as a president: keep yourself free. Don’t assign big tasks to yourself as you are already having a huge responsibility for managing people and tasks. When you are free from tasks you will likely have a good overview of what is going on and will be able to make the right decisions for your group.
Also, this would allow you to work as a buffer in the group. Whenever someone is struggling to finish their assigned job and there is no one else available to handle it, you will be able to pick it up. You can think of yourself as an SOS task force in the group in some way.
Make people feel valued
This is another thing I learnt later as a president. By saying making people feel valued, I do not mean simply to compliment people. Of course, it is necessary to compliment at the right time, and celebrating successes are as important in a group, but what I want to say here is to make people feel valued by their own actions.
In SciCon, the society I worked on, we host events. At the time when the term started, I would try to understand what are each of our interest and strength, and what best we can do to make everyone work on something each of us feels important. To give an example, in one meeting I learnt that one of us was passionate about science communication. Therefore we discussed the possibility to arrange an event themed on that, and as a result, she and another member of the team with a similar interest became responsible for this event. Finally, together with the team, we hosted a panel discussion for careers in science communication, and the event was successful. We even got to invite the chief editor of Nature and one of the writers at New Scientists. (Though the event was postponed for a year due to the pandemics, and I was no longer a president at that time) I hope it was a valuable experience for her.
I practised this at the organisational level. When I was leading the society, all of us were sort of “event officers”. Each of us was responsible for one or two events. Events were hosted at separate times, and whenever an event was near, all of us would bring our skillset to help the person who is the main responsible for that event. For instance, the one who is good at digital art will make event posters, another one who is good at making social media post will do the advertisement and so on. In the end, not only the main organizer of the event would feel a great sense of achievement in making the event happen, but all others also had opportunities to play roles in the event which would bring up the team spirit.
Of course, this depends on the property of the society, but in my opinion, the president is someone who is responsible for making opportunities and building stages for others to perform, making everyone in the society experience growth and feel that we can make things happen with our hands and minds. That is what I hoped for when I was leading a society, to have anyone who participated recognise this experience as something much more than a CV object.
Learn to let go
A final thing I want to mention here is that you need to learn to let go as a society leader. This can be applied to many aspects. For example, when a person is not motivated to do anything for the team, and when you realise that his/her purpose to join society was to boost their CV, you should let them go. But before doing that, it would always be nice to have a chat with the person, to make sure things are going ok with their life and understand the person’s situation. Only let go if the person doesn’t care.
Add to the previous point, as a society leader, being considerate and thoughtful for people in the society is another plus essential to have. They are your teammates. But don’t take things too personally as well, and that’s the balance to learn over time as a leader.
There is another aspect of “let go” I found difficult to achieve: when it came to the time I had to leave the society. Unlike companies/corporations, in a university society, the president almost always changes every year or at most every two years. As the founder of the society, I found this hard, as the society is like your baby and you just cannot give up on it. I don’t have any constructive tips to overcome this, but I believe having this realisation before the end of your term comes might help. Making yourself obsessed with something else and redistributing your newfound time and energy to another project might help, but this is just a piece of general advice.
Let it go. And you will find something more exciting soon.
Anything else you learnt from running a student society? Comment and let me and others know!