What I’ve learned from Student Communities (Part 2)
It took me a few weeks to prepare what I wanted to say for this one. It’s hard to admit failure, but once you do, you can assess your current situation and sprint towards success. This post, is not one of successes, but a documentation of my failures, what I learned from them and how it helped shape a community that is now going into its 4th year with a successful transition in leadership.
Recap
Before we start, let’s review the last post since it’s been a while since I wrote it. Part one of this series of posts was all about the prerequisites of a student community and how to prepare for them.
- Pre-prerequisites: If you are an introvert like me, make sure you take the time to learn to talk to people. Be comfortable communicating your ideas, you’ll be doing a lot of this if you are planning to start an entire student community.
- Appeal to the masses: It’s important to have people interested in this community. The more people that share the same passion as you the easier it will be in the long run.
- Teammates: YOU CANNOT DO THIS ALONE. If someone shares the same passion as you, let them help you! This will make your life easier, and tasks will get completed more efficiently. This will be a big point in the post to come.
- Official Paperwork: Most schools have student group programs where you are able to get tons of resources you wouldn’t have at the beginning. In order to have access to these resources though, there may be some paperwork required to become an official student group. Take the time to get the signatures, create that constitution or code of conduct, and any remaining requirements to be a part of your school / student union.
- Let the real work begin: After completing the prerequisites, it only gets harder from here, so put your safety belts on and keep your hands inside the ride at all times because this is going to be one hell of a roller coaster ride.
Iteration 1 — The Game Club
In order to highlight the successes and the failures of iteration one, we need to look at what happened.
The first year of this community saw its successes in the early stages. It started with around 15 active members meeting regularly every two weeks for a few months. Although I mentioned having teammates as a prerequisite of starting a student community, I tried to run this club alone. This became overbearing and soon became one of many reasons why the first iteration did not go well. I learned the hard way that having a team is extremely important.
The first project we wanted create was a video game. We started off researching different genres we like and what we liked about them, then we slowly made our way to creating a design document on what we wanted to do. Sounds great, right? The problem was by the time we finished this, we were approaching midterms season. On top of that, school assignments started to ramp up and we saw a decrease in attendance.
By the fifth month and the end of the winter term, our active attendance was cut to 7 people. The project we wanted to create became too much to handle for students and by the start of the summer, we pronounced the game officially dead before it even really started.
Now, something that I didn’t mention in this story was that although the meetings started to lose activity, the .devClub Slack, a community messaging application, somehow became more active. The interest was still there, the group was technically not dead. So, before the start of iteration 2 of the club, I gathered students who were still active throughout the summer and we met, discussed, and planned the next iteration of the group.
Moral of the Story — An Analysis
- The interest for a community of students interested in technology was initially present, however when it was decided that the majority of the members of the group wanted to create a single game, it became less of a group about technology in general but more about game development. This restricts the interests of the student group.
- As students with no prior experience, we decided as a collective group what kind of game we wanted to create, what we wanted to use, and what we wanted in the game. This created an impossibly large scope that after some insight, the group that we have would probably never finish it.
- Attendance to meetings decreased, however membership and communication via Slack increased.
- I had less experience as a leader, one of many factors that I believe prevented growth in meetings and organization in the project we were working on.
- Being the lone organizer, it was hard to get some tasks done, leading up to looking disorganized and
The Next Steps
The first attempt didn’t go so well, so what? It was time to reassess the situation and plan for a new iteration of the group. Since the group was still young, we could easily change our direction and head towards a different one. The first thing that needed to be done was to form a team and address the different problems seen in the first 4 months.
Some Student Group Problems and Our Solutions
- Leadership Structure: The roles and tasks of leaders where undeveloped and not clear since there was technically, no team. A small group of fellow students were interested in organizing this group so I created a team based on who was interested and together we developed different roles and tasks that each individual would take creating the necessary positions to properly execute a student group.
- Recruitment: A solid plan needed to be created to help attract new members to the group in the fall. We came up with the idea to print and stick QR codes all around the campus and started a scavenger hunt. This was a fun game and a great way to show all of our favourite places to new students.
- Identity: Find your identity. The first iteration saw failures because we didn’t know who we are, what our focus was on. Today, .devClub is a student group not focusing on just game development, but a group of students looking for a collaborate space to learn, improve, and hone their development skills. This clears the restrictions seen previously, and opens the group to a more general audience. Within this community, if a student is interested in a specific technology, they are able find others who are interested and work together to learn.
- Meeting Structure: We had to look into trying different meeting structures to engage students more. This is STILL a work in progress, but it’s starting to become more engaging. This solution requires an entire post to explain the different styles we tried. The current structure is simply a meeting to talk about and showcase projects, as well as planning for different events such as hack days or collaborations with different student groups.
Some of My Problems and Improvements
- Public Speaking: The feeling of 20 people staring at you is intimidating. Today, I still don’t feel comfortable speaking in front of random people, however, if you get to know your community, speaking in front of them just naturally happens. I took the time to get to know everyone and it made leading meetings and engaging students much easier.
- Student Engagement: Getting the quiet students to participate and discuss is hard. What I found worked was to give everyone a chance to introduce themselves at the beginning (That’s right, 15+ introductions every time someone new joins). This creates rapport among peers which gives a shy student a more comfortable setting.
- Organization: Like I said in the previous section, there was no standard structure for meetings, so at times it got a bit out of hand. This was and still is the hardest part to find that happy medium where students are engaged and not bored.
There are a lot more issues with starting and maintaining a student community, however, the problems I’ve written about today are the ones I felt gave me the most stress when starting .devClub. I hope this helps you get a head start on solving these issues with your own student group and in the next part, I will outline a different set of problems that come with leading a student group when you’ve already established a foundation for your group.
Don’t hesitate to ask questions below! Thank you for reading and stay tuned for the next post.