Can We Expect Student Societies in NUS to Grow and Succeed?

Can they soar or should they always fall?

After four years of being in NUS and participating in multiple societies, is it reasonable to expect student societies to expand in skill, size and scope? After all, students are tied down by their regular academic workload like tutorials, lectures, and project meetings, if not theses and final year projects. So why would we expect that any student society go above and beyond the necessary (or unnecessary) grind for points?

First, we know that undergraduates at other universities have been able to produce and continually expand their organizations. For example, Harvard Model United Nations (HNMUN) attracts 2,500 participants every year. I went during my freshman year, and truly, the scope of the entire 4-day conference was a logistical nightmare.

Founded in 1955 only a decade after the United Nations, Harvard National Model United Nations (HNMUN), is the largest, oldest, and most prestigious conference of its kind. Staffed entirely by Harvard College undergraduates, HNMUN brings over 2,500 students and faculty together from colleges and universities around the world to simulate the activities of the United Nations.

History of HNMUN

I know this from first-hand experience because the next year, I was the Under-secretary for Delegate Affairs for Singapore Model United Nations. It catered for 300 students — soon, the entire staff at HNMUN got acquainted with Murphy’s Law. The delegate placards weren’t printed by the first day; participants had to leave in the middle of the conference; rooms and toilets were mixed up because Logistics wasn’t functioning too well — many of these problems could have been avoided if we had more resources, more experience, more manpower. I don’t know how Harvard does it, and if I did, SMUN would probably be more successful otherwise.

This is barely a tenth of the crowd at HNMUN 2006; the largest hall in the hotel couldn't fit the 2000+ delegates so many people had to stand

While a purely-American run event can be deemed to be less comparable, maybe a Malaysian one can be considered so. the Malaysian Student Leaders Summit (MSLS) has been held two years in a row by a committee of Malaysian students calling themselves the UKEC — the United Kingdom and Eire Council of Malaysian Students, which is the national-level body for Malaysian societies.

MSLS gives place for 500 students at a 2-day stay-out conference held in a prestigious five-star hotel in Kuala Lumpur. It often invites many notable luminaries in respective fields, especially politics and business. I remember last year’s summit had a Young Members of Parliament forum, the (in)famous Khairy Jamaluddin (BN), Tony Pua (DAP) and Nik Nazmi (PKR). It’s entirely student run and FREE for all participants due to heavy sponsorship from commercial interests. The same summit also had the Prime Minister of Malaysia speaking the day before.

I’m sure that there are comparable organizations in NUS as well. HPAIR has achieved a reasonable amount of success, so I hear. I’m really quite proud of the trebuchet building competition in NUS as well since it facilitates learning. NUS RAG is something I feel that it could do much better, since that build-up of skill isn’t there, but yet marginally succeeds due to the institutionalization of the Rag tradition in halls and faculty clubs. (I’ve heard that a 100% completion of a float is idealistic; in the ‘real’ world, I highly doubt this would be acceptable.)

NUS RAG: I wish all of them were as good as this, and continually got better

The scale of these events absolutely require certain amounts of foresight and organizational skill to put up. Inconceivably, the undergraduates that run these events also have their academic commitments and personal concerns to deal with! Yet, they are are able to maximise their use of time, skill and disposable resources to hold these immensely high-profile events annually — which indicates that they do indeed have got more things right than wrong. They demonstrate that it IS reasonable to have lofty goals and expectations. After all, who starts a CCA with the expectation to fail?

It’s only partially a question of limitations. Yes, the CCA system is against us. Yes, our academic system encourages a “race to the bottom”. Yes, people really are there to socialise. Yes, people are fickle and unlike the real world, have no penalty for being unreliable and inconsistent. Yes, our juniors have their own weaknesses. Finally, yes, nobody stays long enough at university to make a difference.

I won’t deny that student societies fail. I’ve failed my fair bit. But we should be understanding why they tend to fail, rather than be content with an expectation of failure. However, pragmatically speaking, we shouldn’t expect the system to always be in our favour. I think the best way to approach student societies is not only recognising limitations to growth, but also finding ways around them. Our juniors can ultimately benefit from our knowledge of mistakes — that’s called progress.

I’ll be approaching those limitations in another post, but let me end on a teaser of one of these limitations: meddling. I see meddling as poor leadership in the outgoing committee because it’s an indicator that the leadership didn’t bother to build leadership qualities and point out common mistakes to an incoming committee during their term in office; thus, they make up for it by meddling ex post. I like the system of understudies used at The Ridge because it mitigates this effect of meddling by providing a legitimate period of teaching/meddling. (Elections are held about early in Semester II, and the winners of the election only totally take charge after the academic year ends). It shows that it is actually quite feasible to pass down leadership and technical skills. This is probably why the Ridge is slightly better than most campus publications.

This won’t be my final reply to the question, and not the one I’ll be sending to the Ridge. I’ll put up a second part, “How Would Student Societies Grow and Succeed?” in a second post.

Sidenote: I don’t interfere with my juniors. I ran for president and I failed; and I could have chosen to linger and meddle; but I gave it up and moved on to the Ridge. I occasionally talk to those people still in the society and it suffers from the same old problems as ever. Sigh.