All Posts Tagged With: "clubs"
Cheers to the Science Pub
Café lectures trend grows
The University of Regina is offering free general interest lectures served alongside pints of beer.
It’s part of a growing trend in university towns where students are proving they’re interested in learning for the sake of learning—so long as they can simultaneously eat snacks and drink beer.
The Science Pub series was created by Bev Robertson, a professor emeritus who now owns the Bushwakker Brewpub where the monthly event is held. He told the Leader-Post that he got the idea after hearing about similar events further west.
A look inside gamers’ clubs on campus
Why study when you can kill goblins?
Pathfinder capture by Olivia Hotshot on Flickr
A few months ago, I was having dinner with a group of colleagues from a hiring committee, including the student representative. This student happened to be one I know fairly well. At one point during the meal she looked at me a little bashfully and said, “You know there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you for a while.” It made me nervous. I could tell something personal was coming.
“What kind of character do you play in D&D?” she asked. It turned out she had just started playing and had learned that I played in a game with other faculty members, so she became curious (answer at the time: Gnomish Paladin; answer now: Half-Orc Monk; oh, and, strictly speaking, its Pathfinder, not D&D).
Gaming of various sorts—board, video, role-playing—seems to have always been popular on campus. I remember hearing about gaming groups at the University of Waterloo when I was still in high school. It’s not surprising, given the number of nerds (I use the term affectionately) who tend to end up in higher education—including advanced nerds like me who end up in the faculty. Indeed, a quick survey of university websites finds gaming groups across the country. At the University of Victoria it’s merged with “tech.” Clubs are active at the University of Guelph and Trent too. Not surprisingly, given the imaginations of game enthusiasts, some clubs play games with their names. The Club at the University Regina—the Gaming Fellowship—gives a nod to Tolkien. Others revel in playful acronyms like the Association of Ryerson Role-Players and Gamers (ARRG!).
Student club offers “philosophical counselling”
Group opposes psychiatry
The Students’ Association of Philosophy for Counsellors at the University of the Fraser Valley promoted their club at a recent mental health awareness week, reports The Cascade.
But links on the SAPC’s website show that they not only oppose psychiatry, but question whether mental illness even exists. They also offer a link to a YouTube video that says antidepressant medications—now taken by more than 10 per cent of American adults—may not work.
The club is partly a discussion group, but also offers free talk therapy from students who have studied philosophical counselling in a UFV class called Philosophy for Counsellors.
According to The Cascade: “philosophical counselling uses [philosophical] reasoning and logic to identify the initial premise upon which a person’s thoughts, beliefs, values and assumptions are founded. The thought processes of an individual are followed and examined for fallacies…”
Top 10 Weirdest Campus Clubs in Canada
From cheese to zombies, there’s something for everyone
Photo courtesy of Abode of Chaos on Flickr
Regardless of your school, you can typically choose from dozens of clubs to find one that suits your interests, whether it be sports, the arts, politics…. or cheese. After scouring the club listings of dozens of universities across the country, I give you my list of The Top 10 Weirdest Campus Clubs in Canada
10. 420 Green Club, Mount Royal University
The club raises awareness of Marijuana “so that our members can become more responsible users and get a better understanding of the real pro’s and con’s [sic] of using Cannabis, myths aside.”
Dispelling some myths about student leadership
Why they do it, where it leads, and what it’s really worth
I hate the term “student leader.” I think a lot of people do. It just seems smarmy and self-congratulatory. And I’m speaking as a guy who lived that role. I can only imagine how the term must aggravate other people. And yet, we do need folks to run our student unions and our residence councils and our campus media and our clubs and more besides. And often we want to talk about those people as a group. So for lack of a better term I’ll call them student leaders.
Some recent discussion about student politics and student politicians (see here and here) got me thinking about this topic. Surrounding the debate about the appropriate role of unions and the right (or lack thereof) of elected students to hold and express their individual opinions, there were a few references to the perceived benefits and opportunities that come along with leadership roles on campus. I’ve heard it all before. Quite a lot of people seem to believe that the whole student leadership scene is just using it all to get … something. Something more than just the opportunity to do the job, anyway. Maybe that’s why the term is so annoying.
Now I don’t want to get into an extensive debate about what union execs are getting paid (see here for that debate) or whether it’s appropriate. That’s only a small fraction of the many student leaders on campus anyway. A very few students get paid something approaching real salaries to do essentially full time jobs. Some others receive honorariums that are probably quite small in relation to the amount of work they put in. And most are simply volunteers. But even the best paid aren’t receiving more than they’d earn for entry-level clerical work. So let’s just agree that it isn’t about the money, and when people suggest there’s something selfish going on they mean something different.
Back to this idea that students get involved in these positions with the expectation of some secondary gain. Most often this accusation is very vague. “Oh, you don’t really care about X (the club, the union, the position), you’re just in it for yourself.” But that’s got to mean something like awards, personal connections, job opportunities, political careers, etc. We’ve already excluded money as a realistic motive, and it makes no sense to suggest that someone is using one student position only to get to another student position. The end goal has to be something more significant than that – some reward or advantage that comes after university is done.
Brief pause. There is always the rare instance of actual abuse. Unfortunately, any time someone has access to a budget and some responsibility there is the chance they might do something fraudulent. Here’s one example of that. I would never attempt to excuse or justify anything like this. I’ll just say that it happens in student activities just as it happens everywhere else. People steal from charities too. It’s very sad. But that’s not what I’m talking about.
Here’s what I’ve discovered about every student leadership position I’ve ever held or interacted with. It’s worth basically nothing to just have the job. I mean it. Sure you can use it as a line on your CV. But then people fill their CVs with bullshit all the time. And if you really want to create an impressive sounding title for yourself just invent a club, register it with your Student Affairs office (or local equivalent) and declare yourself President. It’s very easy. And exactly because it’s easy to manufacture empty claims of this sort, anyone who might possibly care about your activities on campus will not be suckered in by lines of empty crap. Will they care about what you’ve really done on campus? Very possibly they will. But now we’re talking about your actual work and achievements – not the mere fact that you filled a position and held a title.
I definitely know students who found their direction as a result of some role on campus – elected or otherwise. I’m one of them. Certainly there’s a lot of what I do, right now, that I can trace back in some way to my student union days. But I could never have guessed at where I’d end up when the whole thing started. And that’s also true of just about everyone I know. Building on your experiences, finding some success at the things you do well and getting noticed for that … there’s nothing illegitimate about it. That’s just the way people build careers in any environment. And sure, that happens in student leadership as well. Maybe academic advocacy leads you eventually to law school, as it did in my case. Maybe experience with the student press leads to a career in journalism. But not automatically. Not just because you won an election or got hired for a job.
