Extracurricular Club Handling Sovereign Zen Style (Guest Post)

Today I have the pleasure to introduce Stanley Lee to TheUniversityBlog. Stanley writes at The Hub of Gen Y Unconvention and has written a guest post on extracurricular clubs and societies at uni. Over to Stanley!

You’ve probably heard that by joining clubs it’s a great way to enhance your future prospects. If you haven’t heard that, you’re sure to during Freshers’ Week when club leaders look for you to join their groups. However, signing up is often not the win-win situation promised to you.

photo by Aidan Jones

Extracurricular Club Realities (i.e. Why Following the Outdated Advice Doesn’t Work!)

Going post-grad: The admissions committee only cares about the following items(I’m listing them below to refresh your memory):
- Getting good grades in relevant subjects (reason: to prove you know the foundations of the particular research subject well enough before beginning your graduate school education)
- Be known as one of the best students in your major (this is noticed by the professors in the form of complementary accomplishments such as awards, grants, and excellent recommendations)
- Demonstrating your ability to handle the demands of research, often achieved by doing good work in summer research terms and rewarded with the type of responsibilities that will, down the line, impress the professors reviewing your file, including publications!
Finding employment: If you think recruiters will give more consideration to the mention of club leadership roles on your CV/resume, you’re dead wrong! It may, at most, make the recruiter’s day when he/she is screening mountains of applications! Employers look for the following qualities for new hires, even though this traditional process is actually insanely inefficient for both parties:
- Grades, where you went to school, and to a certain extent, your major, especially for a technical job to ensure you encountered the appropriate skills for the job
- Interview performance after application screening. Whether the firm is big or small, the purpose is to find out whether you can solve complex and fundamental problems on the fly, seem like a decent person, understand their business, and not a jerk waiting to poison the entire team/department.
- Hiring decision is made (which may or may not be within your control).

Basically, graduate programs and potential principal investigators want to minimize their risk of recruiting a “dud” (as this could be a fairly devastating experience for all parties involved) with the competitive landscape between millions of different research institutions, and maximize the output of the relationship for the professor’s future promotion and cases in their tenure positions. For employers, it’s even more straightforward: the ability for the candidate to comply to company policies and commit to maximizing profits for the company without being a disruption.

During Freshers’ week, you will definitely receive mountains of pitches from club leaders claiming how “beneficial” the particular clubs are for your personal experience (I know this personally because I was sufficiently involved in anywhere from an engineering design competition team to professional development organizations when I was a college student, i.e. first-hand experience as one of those students who were in too many clubs resulting in severe time famine):

Handling sales pitches: Hey, you gotta put yourself in their shoes when trying to figure out what they’d gain from you joining the leadership group. They will have new blood to share the load of completing the tasks, many of which are time-consumers if you are there to at least do a decent job.
Handling additional responsibility requests: If you did buy into the sales pitch and produce quality results to improve the club, you will soon be flooded with more and more overwhelming requests to put out fires. They will try to persuade you to buy into the team concept as an excuse to save their rear-ends to ensure a certain event is a huge success. This is a sure recipe for disaster. Politely but firmly turn down any requests that you can’t make time for.
Handling overloads (including quitting the club if necessary): If you’re overwhelmed with the responsibilities because you haven’t been able to enforce the commitment cap in the early stages, now is a great time to think whether the club is just using you as a tool, not caring for your personal interests (at least this is a great preview of how the real world works with some people using human capital as a means to an end, especially those who are not concerned about long-term business relationships).

Clubs are fabulous under certain conditions:

You get a more complete perspective on how you see the world by enhanced engagement and relaxation,
it gives you exclusive in-person access to networks that you have the opportunity to access before, and
it is not a time-sink (although this has a huge part with managing expectations).

Point 2 is usually exaggerated because you can find out the contact just as easily with the Internet, on top of the social media networks. Point 3 is usually hidden as much as possible because its expose will chase away members who will complete work for the club.

So, please do yourself a favour. Be diligent on your choices like any other choices, especially if you’re intelligent enough to head to university.

If you are hungry for more information about this, feel free to check out my video on the The Hub of Gen Y Unconvention. Feel free to follow me on Twitter at @stanigator!

Woody Allen and the art of letting go

Woody Allen has got his head screwed on. He knows how to let go.

photo by Gilberto Viciedo

Allen told the New York Times that he never rewatches his films after they are made:

“I’ve never once in my life seen any film of mine after I put it out. Ever. I haven’t seen ‘Take the Money and Run’ since 1968. I haven’t seen ‘Annie Hall’ or ‘Manhattan’ or any film I’ve made afterward. If I’m on the treadmill and I’m scooting through the channels, and I come across one of them, I go right past it instantly, because I feel it could only depress me. I would only feel, ‘Oh God, this is so awful, if I could only do that again.'” [Source]

He doesn’t want to feel that itch to improve the past. There’s no point in being embarrassed now. That type of worry is redundant.

I also admire Allen’s drive to start working on a new project as soon as he finishes the last. Always moving ahead, never looking at what’s passed.

I’m sure he still learns from mistakes and takes from experiences. But he won’t dwell. Neither will he panic about the future.

Compare this with Jenny Diski’s comment in this fortnight’s London Review of Books:

“It’s absolutely true that writing a book doesn’t make you happy (it’s never good enough while you’re writing it or after you’ve finished it, and anyway what about the next one).”

I can’t say how happy Woody Allen is when he’s writing screenplays, but he does manage the situation well:

It may never be good enough, but he cracks on with that understanding.
He lets go once the project is finished.
The next project is a challenge worth starting right away.

How do you use this as a student?

Whatever you do, be ready to let go:

Let go of research. You’ll never know everything. The aim is to have *enough*.
Perfection is not attainable. Letting go before it’s perfect is necessary, not shameful.
When you hand work in, let go of that burden. Stop thinking of ways to improve on writing style (at least until it’s handed back).
When you let go of one project, grab hold of the next as soon as possible.

What do you need to stop dwelling on? What is your next project going to be?

Straight A and still not OK

3,500 straight-A students failed to secure a place at university last year.

This year, despite a new A* (A-star) grade, a similar problem is occurring.

photo by mugley

With 3 A* and 1 A, Amber Fox thought she would find a place to study Medicine. However, none of the universities she applied to offered her a place. Fast forward to clearing and there were no places to be had in her chosen field.

Consider this story for a moment. Amber achieves impressive A-level results, she has identified a career path she would like to follow, and that career requires education beyond A-levels. The natural course of action is, therefore, university.

David Willetts, Minister of State for Universities and Science, says that university should not be the only route to success. A valid point. He also states that the application process to university is a competitive one and not all applicants will be successful.

Unfortunately, competition for a place at university is an increasingly random process. When someone with top grades is denied a place and cannot follow their chosen career without a degree, something is wrong.

Willetts explains the possibility of Further Education in order to work toward a degree. But even this appears to be a false trail at the moment. FE principal, John Widdowson, told the BBC that student numbers are similarly capped at colleges:

“It goes against the grain to be turning away well-qualified, enthusiastic students and say ‘I’m sorry, we haven’t got a place for you’.” [Source]

I wish Amber the best of luck in reapplying to universities next year, which is her aim. Amber is not alone. Willetts is aware that many straight-A students are falling out the system and that further understanding is required to improve the situation. It remains to be seen what action is taken on this front.

The application process clearly can’t keep up with other changes. To rely on personal statements and minor quibbles to sort out potential offers is unreasonable. I feel uncomfortable when so much hinges upon so little, negating all the effort that came before. Yet this is what it ultimately boils down to.

Admissions teams are not to blame here. Popular, heavily fought courses are bound to be oversubscribed. Despite the A* grade, admissions officers still find difficulty in choosing who to take on.

In following years, as top students reapply, they deny the next set of potential students. And the cycle continues.

So what can make the system more reasonable? Some argue that places should be offered after exam results are known, not before. Others say the artificial cap on university places should be lifted. There are many options, no absolute right answer, but plenty of room for improvement.

In a competitive field such as Medicine, I doubt all top students would find success even if more places were offered and those offers came after A-level results were released. However, the situation wouldn’t feel as skewed as it is now.

In years gone by, a story like Amber’s would be shocking due to its unusual nature. Now it’s shocking because so many young people must suffer in the same way.

For more on this story, Radio 4’s “The Report” is available to listen to for a week.

Should lectures be banned?

I’ve just been listening to Donald Clark at the #altc2010 conference in Nottingham. His keynote speech argued that lectures are rubbish. Thought I’d share a hastily-written post in the aftermath.

Clark asked why students are still lectured to. He suggested that a complete rethink is necessary, not just the odd tweak.

Would you like to see the back of these? (photo by iwouldstay)

@GeoShore sums things up amusingly via Twitter:

#altc2010 keynote summary: “Lectures don’t work. Lecturers can’t lecture. Everyone’s been doing it wrong. Arse. Feck. Nuns.”

Despite a couple of questions from the audience asking about alternatives to the lecture, no specific answers were forthcoming. Clark replied at one point that the answers are “staring us in the face”.

I’ve attended both great lectures and awful ones. That suggests lectures aren’t automatically a bad thing.

The lecture is just one part of the learning process. We read, we’re lectured to, we participate in seminars, we have one-to-one tutorials, we form study groups, we have online participation…

Clark said he enjoyed TED talks and appreciated their production values, but he seemed to be looking for more. TED talks are still, essentially, lectures.

Same with podcasts and videos. Clark agreed that it’s better to record a lecture than do nothing at all. However, he argued that this method merely results in a load of poorly delivered lectures streaming out, providing no further value to learners.

Other than end lectures altogether, I’m not entirely sure what is required. A complete rethink may result in new delivery methods, so will they look like lectures at all?

If new techniques do resemble lectures, why have other delivery styles so far been given a lukewarm reception (if that) by Clark?

If new techniques don’t resemble lectures, the result has been to abandon lectures, not rethink them.

Clark suggested that there needs to be more collaboration and discussion present in this type of learning. That’s what seminars and tutorials are all about. This isn’t an either/or situation; different methods of teaching and learning are delivered. If lectures were the single focus for all information intake, we’d be in trouble. But they’re not.

Over to you. Are lectures dead? Is the lecturer to blame? What are the alternatives? Are podcasts and video lectures good, or not good enough? Is the physical process of attending lectures a hardship in itself?

I’d love to hear your views!