November 2020
Featured Article
Student Leaders: Supporting Students and Our Campus Community
By: Katelyn Brinker, PhD Student, Iowa State University
This semester has had its challenges for all of us. Between online classes with fewer resources for getting help, a lack of hands on learning opportunities, no days off, world events, and missing friends and social activities, many students are feeling a combination of burnt out and overwhelmed.
Student leaders from IEEE-Eta Kappa Nu (IEEE-HKN) Chapters and other ECE department student orgs have been rising to the challenge of trying to address these struggles, in order to help their friends and campus community while also dealing with the same challenges ourselves. Here at the Nu Chapter of IEEE-HKN at Iowa State University, we’ve turned our Help Room where students would be able to drop in and get help with classes from HKN members into a virtual operation. We have open hours every weekday on webex, an online forum, and an appointment system. We’ve also been hosting some online hands on skill building workshops, a semester long problem solving competition, virtual social events, and online talks with professors and alumni. Other chapters have been also hosting online exam prep sessions and bringing in new speakers and companies that would normally be tough to get for in person meetings.
While all of these initiatives have definitely made a positive impact, I want to be careful not to paint these as an overarching solution. As student leaders we’ve been seeing reduced participation in these initiatives and have had an increasingly challenging time engaging students as the semester goes on. We’ve also been seeing student leaders resign from their positions or decide not to continue in their positions for the upcoming semester. The reason for all of this is also becoming increasingly clear:
We’ve been trying to project an appearance of having it together and have had normal expectations of productivity placed upon us, yet actually living up to these demands of ourselves has been effectively impossible. We’re operating in a system where we feel like we have to work constantly to keep up while dealing with trouble focusing and staying motivated, and at the end of the day, many students feel like they can’t take the time to participate in extracurricular events without incurring consequences in other parts of their life. Simply put, taking the time to attend a talk takes away from the already not enough time they had to do their schoolwork. The name of the game right now is simply making it through and getting to winter break. But this also raises the question, is next semester going to be any better?
As student leaders, we’re resilient and we care deeply about our communities so we’re going to keep trying to do our part. My question to you is this: what part will you play in making next semester better?