An Outlet: Part 3

29 April, 2018.

So there is this super annoying junior who is eyeing on the position of being WORD's next president and unfortunately, I can see it being a reality.

All the clubs in our college were introduced in this academic year. Each club was to have a President from the second year (students), 2 Vice Presidents from the second and the first year each and 2 Secretaries from the second and first year each. Each club was also given a mentor for guidance. Ideally, the President needs to call all the shorts with the mentor just having an advisory role but in our club, our (now ex) mentor, that is Ms. Paula, leaded the club at all fronts.

Though we all came up with our ideas of what activities we'd want to conduct, Ms. Paula always had the final say. She decided what the club will do, what the club Comittee members will do, when to call for meetings, when to schedule our events, networking with students and convincing them to join our club, everything. The President was MIA for the first couple of months and I quickly realised that I'm not the creative type nor am I a good leader. I just followed what instructions Ms. Paula gave me. So basically Ms. Paula was the leader and she got her work done from us. Ofcourse majorly for the betterment of the club. And I'm not at all bashing her here. I'm just trying to explain how inefficient and slightly unenthusiastic we were as the club position holders.

Throughout the year, due to Ms. Paula's networking skills (that made up for lack of ours), she roped in people and directly added them to the Comittee group. Since she was the one who called the shots, we didn't say anything to her. 

But these people didn't remain. They came in because Ms. Paula thought they were promising but they just didn't stay for too long to get acquainted with us and to become part of the team. And there were quite a few of them. Even some original members stopped giving a shit after one point. At the end of academic, which is now, only 4 of the original 8 Comittee members have remained. 

One of the main reasons, according to me, is the fact Ms. Paula put most of her focus and pulled the Comittee members towards making reports for the college. Kristen had started the Report Writing Comittee (called the Content Team) with help of a (now ex) faculty and once he left, Ms. Paula took over his responsibilities and Kristen had to report (pun intended) to her. Even last year, Kristen had a lot of problem getting people to write reports for her because not many were interested. When Ms. Paula got appointment as WORD's mentor, she brought along that report writing responsibility to the club. Kristen had opted for and eventually became the Vice President for another club so that report writing burden fell on the Comittee members. My batch was already aware of and not interested in being a Content Team member, so the juniors were pulled in for the job.

The reports used to take majority of our time and effort that we couldn't effectively plan anything else. Even though I won't call report writing boring, everyone else did. We even tried to get out of it, but Ms. Paula told us that our Dean sends these reports to outsiders and that they are very important to the institution. To this date I'm still skeptical about who our reports go to. My parents have recieved so many emails from college informing them about all the activities held in campus but none, and absolutely none of them have been our reports. I think this is why people left. This is why WORD has only ever had one public event. This is why others think WORD is a failed club who does nothing.

In December, an inter-club festival called Global Village rolled in and by that time I had become quite inactive in the club. I just wanted a break from all the negativity and the tremendous burden of always working behind the scenes and not getting any recognition for it (recognition in the sense no one knew that Paul and I were working 'on reports'. They thought WORD wasn't doing anything but we were! I wanted people to know that!) and decided not to take part in the Global Village whether on or off stage. The President was back in action by that time I'm surprised how he and Ms.Paula even found people to be a part of our contingent! Though we didn't place, there was influx of new members.