K Story Guide – Student Organization Engagement

LET’S TALK ABOUT your student organization experience:

Participating in a student organization is an opportunity for students to collaborate with others who share the same mission or passion as them. It is a way to build a sense of community on campus. Being a part of a student organization provides you with the opportunity to educate others about different cultures or social issues that go beyond the College’s campus. Student organizations are all about creating safe spaces on campus that are welcoming for others to share their opinions or concerns about many different topics.

LET’S TALK ABOUT the transferable skills acquired:

  1. Critical Thinking/Problem Solving: When communicating with others about sensitive topics, you must be mindful of other feelings and opinions. Student organizations require the skill of conducting active conversations. This includes acknowledging others’ opinions as well as learning when to end a conversation when it is working toward a certain goal. With this skill, you learn how to be active on campus when educating others on important issues, such as social justice.
  2. Career and Self-Development: Student organizations meetings help you to be the best version of yourself by learning more about how to communicate your ideas to others as well as listening to others’ ideas. By being more open to others’ ideas, you can gain more insight on a particular topic or a new way to approach something. Student orgs are places where you can learn from one another.
  3. Professionalism: Student organizations require members to maintain a certain image for their organization. As a member of a student organization, you serve as an ambassador for the organization on campus where you can educate others on the objectives/goals of your organization. When working with other members in your organization, you learn how to maintain a level of respect for others, especially when you do not necessarily agree with their ideas.
  4. Equity and Inclusion: As there are many identity-based student organizations, you are able to learn from other students about their cultural values and how they would like to honor their culture on campus. With students educating other students on campus about their own cultures, it helps to create a mutual respect amongst one another. Learning about different cultures from peers increases one’s cultural fluency, as it requires you to be open-minded and respectful toward one another’s cultural norms as well as challenge your own biases.
  5. Teamwork/Collaboration: A major aspect of student organizations is event planning, so most student org meetings involve working together on planning the next event. This may include coming up with a budget, a theme, an objective of the event and how to increase student engagement levels. While working together, everyone must learn how to be flexible and patient as not everything may go as planned, such as delays on getting something approved by administration or aligning schedules with other members in the organization.
  6. Technology: Student organizations require a lot of interaction with students, faculty on campus, and people off campus. Therefore, members in student orgs use multiple ways to communicate with others via Teams, email, social media, etc. You may work to increase engagement in student organizations by sending emails about events that are planned or reaching out to important people off campus or faculty on campus to be a part of events.

LET’S TALK ABOUT sample resume action statements:

  • Establish a continuous legacy for the organization.
  • Network with other people on campus, such as students, staff and/or faculty on campus.
  • Develop long, professional relationships with staff/faculty on campus.
  • Coordinate with a diverse set of students to obtain different perspectives across different topics/issues.
  • Foster safe, welcoming spaces for students on campus.
  • Manage and organize events on campus.
  • Research engaging ways for people to learn.

CCPD TIPS

Behavioral Interview Prompts:

Employers often ask questions about how you responded to specific situations.


For example:

  • Tell me about a time when you experienced a conflict while working on a team.
  • Describe a time when you had to work well under pressure.
  • Give me an example of a time when you showed initiative and took the lead.
  • Tell me about a time when you made a mistake, and how you handled it.


S.T.A.R. METHOD

You can use STAR as a framework to structure your response to behavioral
interview questions.

  • Describe the context and background for a Situation that’s relevant to the question.
  • Explain the Task that needed to be completed. What was the goal?
  • Outline specific Actions you took. How did you exhibit transferable skills?
  • Share the Results of your actions. What was the outcome? What did you learn?