Lessons Learned from My Experience in Student Organizations

Student clubs are a big part of my college education. In fact, I think a solid 50% of the hours I spend working on things at UCLA are for my clubs. I find that student clubs give me the space to be creative, exercise leadership, and practice working with others in ways that traditional classes cannot replicate. 

For context, I joined an entrepreneurship club called Bruin Entrepreneurs (BE) in my freshman year, looking for ways to enter the entrepreneurship scene on campus. The quarter after, I joined the UCLA branch of 180 Degrees Consulting to learn more about consulting. I have been involved with these two clubs ever since. 

I wore different hats during my time in these organizations — I was a consultant, a project lead, Director of Partnerships, Director of Marketing, and Internal Vice President. These are incredibly diverse roles requiring different skillsets and time commitments, and my freshman-year self would not have believed that I would end up in these roles. As my junior year wrapped up and summer came around, I took a step back and thought about what these experiences have taught me on management, teamwork, and leadership.

I concluded my reflection with 3 main learnings:

Lesson #1: Reinventing vs Refining

Being in an entrepreneurship club means you’re surrounded by people who want to make things. Start new projects. Constantly reinventing the way things are done. It’s an amazing culture to immerse yourself in.

However, we soon learned that there are times when you need to stop reinventing, and start taking a closer look on existing projects that we have on hand. To put it simply, I learned about the valuable concept of bandwidth and capacity. 

As an organization, we have limited resources. Our time and efforts are scarce resources that need to be allocated to a million different things, including classes. Keeping this in mind, when I joined the Executive Board of BE in my junior year, we decided to not brainstorm for new initiatives, and instead dedicate all our efforts into perfecting the programs and events that we had inherited from the previous year. 

This process was a lot harder than I thought it would be. As the club matured, we realize that we couldn’t continue to work in a chaotic and haphazard way. As a club with years of accomplishments, it shouldn’t be the case that every time we do something, it feels like we are doing it for the first time. There had to be a way to document knowledge and pass it down to the next generation of leaders in the organization. So, we worked hard to implement a standard of procedures, redesigning processes within the organization, and we took great care in restructuring the club to support our main events and programs.

We couldn’t have done any of that if we were also trying to start new initiatives along the way. New events would have taken the focus away from building our people and systems, and would have erased the brand that we have worked to build with our previous events. 

Still, when we ended our term in the Spring Quarter, I struggled with feeling accomplished. I couldn’t help but feel that I didn’t contribute — or that I wasn’t “entrepreneurial” enough to come up with a brand new initiative for the club during my term. Of course, this is not true — we had improved the club in a different yet just as valuable way, and it took me some reflection to realize this. 

I learned that there are times where we have to be bold and start new initiatives, but there are also times where we have to perfect and refine the existing things that you already have.

Lesson #2: Managing people is not easy… especially students

This lesson is probably pretty obvious, but it’s something that I didn’t fully understand until I experienced it myself. Taking on leadership positions is one of the most intimidating things I’ve ever done. However, it’s also one of the most rewarding experiences, because I learned a lot about the nuances of managing teams, people, and expectations. 

First of all, when adopting a leadership role, I struggle in finding the right balance between being “one of the team” and being taken seriously. I always avoid becoming an overly authoritative figure and I try to become super friendly to the people I work with. As a result, people stop taking my deadlines and requests seriously. I used to be scared of imposing real consequences and I thought I could get things done just by being best friends with my team. 

I learned the hard way that this does not always work — it is important to set expectations on the very first day of a project and to have tough conversations once in a while.

Additionally, I cannot emphasize how much I came to value the importance of communication. I realized that I am usually the most frustrated when I’m working on projects where communication is lacking. This is when people don’t respond to group messages (or when they do, it’s very minimal), don’t share their concerns or challenges, don’t participate in discussions, or are generally just disengaged. 

This happens a lot in student clubs (or even class projects). One of the unique challenges of working with students is that they have tons of other things going on, and it’s hard to know if the thing you’re working together on is even in their priority list. If you’ve ever worked in student groups, you are probably familiar with people saying something similar to this: “Oh, I’m so sorry. I had a midterm and another homework going on, so I couldn’t finish it. Can I do it by next week?” 

I realized that I actually don’t mind it when my team moves things around to fit their schedule, but this requires communication. I’ve come to appreciate when people inform me that they have other things that they have to prioritize and work out alternatives together with me. This experience made me very conscious of my own communication skills when I have to work with others. I try to keep myself accountable and be on top of communicating my priorities, expectations, and especially challenges to my managers and teammates. 

Overall, leading student clubs taught me the importance of setting expectations and communication (and that students are probably the hardest group of people to manage).

Lesson #3: Hard Work Vs. Qualifications 

One of the hardest lessons I learned is that seemingly qualified people are not always the best when choosing people for your team. I often find instances where we overlook hard work and dedication, and instead are blinded by someone’s flashy experiences and qualification.

For example, in my entrepreneurship club, we would be impressed when a board member applicant states that they were a founder of a startup. At my consulting club, we would be blown away by someone who interned at a prestigious company. These people would usually get interviews and most likely be accepted to the club. 

We would also have several applicants who may have more modest experiences — people who are “less qualified". But when we interviewed them, they seemed eager to learn, eager to contribute, and ready to hit the ground running and commit to our missions.

It turned out that these people always end up being the best performers in the club, and end up being my favorite people to work with. Surprisingly, one of the biggest disappointments I’ve had from people are from these “qualified” people who turned out to be not as committed. In fact, it seemed that it was because they had so many accomplishments that they didn't feel the need to contribute as much, or feel like they have better things to do. They actually become the worst kind of people to have on your team, and the most difficult to work with.

Of course these two qualities are not mutually exclusive. Someone can be hardworking and qualified, and someone can be neither. This lesson was to not be distracted by qualifications alone, but to put significant emphasis on how much a person is willing to commit to something and how eager they are to learn instead. 

Concluding thoughts

This upcoming year, I am concluding my college years by taking on the role of President of the 180 Degrees Consulting UCLA. I hope that I’ll be able to apply what I’ve learned over the years, as well as learn even more on how to become an effective leader and team player. 

For my peers who are still in college, or about to start college, I really encourage taking part in student organizations as it gives you valuable, real-life experiences of running something that you care about. Not only that, the skills you cultivate over time will translate well into your professional and personal life.