How To Make The Best Out Of Your Term on VSA/VSU/UVSA Staff

Sony Wang
Sony Wang
Jul 10, 2017 · 8 min read

Congratulations! If you’re reading this, then chances are, you might be:

  • A current staff member for your VSA/VSU/UVSA Board
  • A former staff member of a VSA/VSU/UVSA Board
  • A prospective candidate for a staff member position

For those that have held a position before, I’m sure we can all agree on some level that one year terms go by way too quickly. We start off excited and anxious for the journey that awaits us, charge off into the battlefield executing general meetings, after events, and fundraisers, and deliver our swan song with VCN. Before we realize it, we’re passing on the torch to our successors and pat ourselves on the back for making it to the end.

I remember standing on the pedestrian overpass by my house, watching all the cars zoom by on the freeway, thinking to myself what I could have done better for my staff and for my organization, and beating myself up for not being the person and the leader I could have been for my team. I couldn’t help but think that I wasted a good chunk of the year spinning my wheels and being afraid of not being/doing enough and disappointing my predecessors. As much as I wanted to try and redeem myself and to put forth what I learned into another year as president, I ultimately chose not to re-run and stepped aside for the new board to continue the mission of growing the family of leaders that is VSA.

If I had another chance to do it all over with the knowledge and experience that I have now, I would tell myself and my team to focus on these areas and to always keep these actions in mind in order to maximize our impact and to make every moment count.


Create a List of Goals For The Year, And Then Trim It Down to Only a Very Small Number

When coming up with individual and team goals for the year, we can all seek to learn something new from this man, Warren Buffett. One of the most successful investors in the world, and ranked 2nd richest person in the U.S. (second only to Bill Gates), Buffett utilizes this strategy, known as the 25–5 rule, to document and prioritize his career goals:

  • Create a list of 25 goals or accomplishments you’d like to have achieved by the end of the year (in no particular order)
  • Select 5 goals/accomplishments as a group that you all deem as most important out of the list of 25
  • Work first on accomplishing those 5 goals before even thinking about or starting to tackle any of the remaining 20

Now, you all don’t have to follow the 25–5 rule to the T. You could come up with 15 goals and only prioritize 3 or even 10 and 2. The point that Buffett tries to drive home is that we as humans are not meant to multitask, and that we’re much better off allocating all of our mental resources to what is of utmost importance to us. It is not to say that the other goals aren’t important, but relative to your top goals, everything else becomes a distraction instead. I think that teams tend to overestimate the amount of work they’ll be able to complete in the course of the year, and underestimate the impact of other responsibilities on their plate: school, work, relationships, social life outside of VSA etc. By hyper-focusing on the top goals of your organization, your team will be able to be more focused and deliberate with your actions, and can most likely speed up the rate in which you’ll be able to accomplish these goals.

ABS: Always Be Steering

When asked, “What percentage of your time do you spend retrospecting and thinking about how you work and how it’s working for you?”, most organizations answer between 0% and 5%. I can definitely attest to this from my own experiences. It’s far too common that reflection only takes place halfway through the year, or at the end of the year, when our terms are all over, when it’s too late to make plans to enact change. It’s like inputting an address into your GPS, finding where the end destination is, and then getting in your car and doing nothing but press the gas pedal, hoping that after some time, it’ll take you to where you want to be. What we, as student organizations, need to do more of is practice continuous steering: the act of reflecting on our progress and responding to changes in our environment by making repeated incremental shifts to ensure we’re headed in the direction we want to be headed.

It’s so easy to not make retrospecting a priority, since it’s not urgent, compared to the meetings and events we have to plan and go to. However, in order to make and accelerate change, we need to focus more on the important but not urgent tasks. We need to create the space for ourselves in our meetings to come face to face with our progress, and to be honest with ourselves on what is and isn’t working and steer. Continuous steering may and probably will take up more energy and gas if we’re still going with the car analogy, but maneuvering around obstacles and making detours instead of driving straight through everything that’s in our way to get to our destination will maintain the structural integrity of the car (VSA/VSU) and the people in it (yourselves, your staff, and your members). So make the space in our staff meetings, even for just 15–20 minutes every month, to reflect upon your top organizational goals and build those retrospective muscles. I promise, it’ll be worth the time.

School Comes First

Now this might be a polarizing opinion to some, but I’ll stand by strongly and say that if you’re not performing well enough in school to make decent grades and stay off of academic probation, then chances are it’ll also negatively impact your performance on staff too. Charles Duhigg, author of the book “The Power of Habit”, talks about how certain habits are more important than others. He calls these keystone habits, which are habits that cause chain reactions and trigger other positive changes and habits in your life.

An example of a keystone habit would be exercising a few times a week. Exercising will lower stress, which will probably lower the chances of stress eating, and increase your alertness and productivity, allowing you to focus better in class, which leads to better grades. You get the picture. Studying for classes and keeping up with schoolwork can also be looked at as a keystone habit. With your grades healthy and stable, you’ll not only feel more secure, but you’ll be able to have an easier time keeping your grades where they are and be able to invest the rest of your energy into your other commitments.

Sometimes, the issue of decreased academic performance coupled with student org involvement isn’t due to school not being a priority but instead due to not having the proper skills to manage one’s time. Regardless of whether you’re having this problem or not, check out my friend Tim’s articles on scheduling your week by utilizing the autopilot schedule and the fixed interval schedule to see if these tools can help you organize your time.

Pave a Path For Your Successors and Create a Legacy

There are many reasons that motivate individuals like yourself to run for a board position for your VSA/VSU. One of the most common reasons I hear and see is because VSA has grown to become a family to you, and that you would want to do everything in your power to help it grow and share it with others. I too, saw my VSA as a family that I knew supported me and helped create the space for me to be myself. I then wondered where and how is this sense of family developed, but even more importantly, what environment allowed this sense of family to be able to exist? I think that it was made possible because of the work and heart that previous VSA members have put into the organization, the values that they’ve instilled in each other that have endured through the years.

You or your friends may have joined and stayed in VSA because of others who you looked up to and enjoyed spending time with. Those people may have also stayed because of others as well, and so on so forth. The bonds that we create with each other have ripple effects that continue to spread long after we’re gone. We just don’t realize it or think about this sort of stuff every day. It’s easy to compartmentalize the work we do and the impact that we have in a single year, but we sometimes don’t think about, or honestly don’t care about what happens to the organization after we leave. I’m not saying that you have to care about what happens after you leave, but I do think that you owe it to those who came before you and those who will come after you to do your best to build upon an organization that has given you the opportunity to learn and grow as a leader.

We may not have the luxury of time to learn from our mistakes and to improve our organization even further within a 1-year term, but we can contribute good activities, tools, and systems for working to future boards so that it doesn’t always have to feel like we’re always hitting the reset button every year. For you RPG video gamers out there, let’s not start a new game after we’ve beaten it at the end of the year, but instead use “new game plus”.


What you’re about to embark on is a journey unlike any other. It’s taken a few years out of college for me to really appreciate and cherish the rare opportunity of being able to hold a leadership position with people so close to me in age that can really make an immediate and visible impact. It’s hard to get that same level of opportunity in the professional world. You’re working with individuals from multiple generations and unless you’ve been in the company for some time, it’s difficult to rise up to a management position that really has the power to make company-changing decisions. So try to appreciate what you have now even if you can’t see it yet. Now, have fun, make it count, and let’s get to work.


For those that have held a position before, what additional perspectives or advice do you have for your teammates? Was there something that you wish I could have expanded on? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!

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