Leading A New Student Organization During A Pandemic – My Tips and Experience

Iman Mevaa

Making a new organization run is not an easy task. Reaching out to new members, taking Brightspace modules to learn administrative jargon, fundraising, dealing with the bureaucracy of organizing events, communicating with faculty advisors… It takes a lot of effort and time, requires a well-organized team and a good amount of perseverance. In this article, I share my experience on the board of a new organization and some tips for any curious soul.

My Experience

I joined the Francophone Student Association (FSA), which is a club of French-speaking students, at the first event they ever organized. It was during my freshman year, or should I say my first semester as COVID-19 hit in March and made the organization of events impossible. The pandemic shifted the focus of the board from building a French-speaking community on campus to trying to cope with the new reality. After a Spring 2020 semester without any activities, I joined the board as the vice-president with the goal of dynamizing the organization. My plans were to come back to campus after spending a semester doing online school from France, but I could not because of unpredicted restrictions against international students.

As the incoming vice-president of the Francophone Student Association, I started brainstorming virtual event ideas over the summer. I spammed the other board members with my Word documents, Excels, and PowerPoints as the end of August approached, super excited to hold a decision-making position of the sort for the first time. The only quack was the pandemic. With members spread across the world from Seattle to Chicago, from France to Haiti, or even Hungary, I felt a general need for the members to reconnect and maintain the sense of community the organization was created for despite the pandemic and the distance between us.

In Fall 2020 everything had to be online, from cook-along sessions to Halloween events, and with the monstrous amount of time we, as students, had to spend staring at screens with online classes I was afraid our events’ attendance would be dramatically low. However, my enthusiasm to rebuild our community online overcame my concerns. Our board planned a series of virtual events including Among Us sessions for Halloween, cake decoration contests, movie nights, and comedy nights. With the time difference and the events held online we sometimes had fewer attendees than expected but we tried our best to remain a support group and to update one another on our daily routines impacted by the pandemic.

The following semester (Spring 2020), I went back on campus and no longer had to deal with a 6-hour time difference with my peers. The global situation was better as the release of COVID-19 vaccines had just been announced. More classes were available in person, however, the FSA stuck to organizing virtual events for safety and simplicity’s sake. Following the Protect Purdue protocol, I finally got to meet some members in person, especially the freshmen who I was meeting for the first time. Fun fact: some of them ended up being 40-cm taller than I pictured from our Zoom events.

I started my junior year this past Fall 2021 as the elected president of the Francophone Student Association. With classes resuming fully in person, in-person meetings allowed, the Protect Purdue policies part of our daily lives, we are witnessing a considerably higher attendance. Students are curious about our organization; members are excited to attend our events from debates to pumpkin carving sessions. Smiles, human warmth, laughter are always “au rendez-vous”.

Even if this year’s context is just slightly different from last year, the goal of the FSA is completely different. While we worked on maintaining a sense of online community and camaraderie when everyone was all over the globe, our logic this year is to expand, to make ourselves known on campus, to recruit new members.

A Few Tips

My experience has taught me several lessons I think would be useful for anyone involved in a relatively new organization. Here are a few tips:

· Think of ways you can make your student club better and put things in place to do so.

· Make sure you align with the mission or goal of the organization because it will most likely take more time than expected.

· Attend meetings and listen to members and ask for their opinions and feedback to organize events people will actually attend.

· Build a collaborative board. “Teamwork makes the dream work.”

· Communicate with the board, the members, and have active profiles on social media.

· Be open and flexible. Not everything goes as planned, but you'll be fine.

My experience with the Francophone Student Association has been rich and unpredictable. What the leadership team and I have been doing has not always yielded the desired results especially during a pandemic. However, as the situation got better, we started to collect the fruits of our labor. I am proud of the progress the FSA has made since its beginning despite the impossibility of human contact which is at the core of every club and organization. In the end, my journey with the FSA has been a beautiful experience that I encourage everyone to start.