What kind of life do you offer the students on your campus? What does their student life include? What is campus life like to new students? How can students enjoy life more at your school? The answer is really to provide the best student life events you can think of.
To make your campus the best experience for students, asking these questions will help you make great decisions that truly lead to them having their best life.
To students, every week brings them a potentially significant event in their life. Friends they meet at student life events could become friends for a lifetime. Are you encouraging them to attend parties and meetings, campus events, and exciting opportunities on campus that are never found in the community?
They could meet their one and only soulmate. What events do you have for mingling and socializing?
In college, students are prepping for a dream job of a lifetime. Is there any type of employment that they could start, which would become the foundation for a nonprofit organization that changes the world?
College Education Bottom Line: They Don’t Have Time to Do Everything
College is fun. It’s hard work. It’s personal growth. It’s hopefully filled with events for students with all of these in mind. In this regard, the Student Activities Department is one of the main orchestrators of a student’s life on campus. Their primary goal is creating social event ideas for college students and bringing events on campus for students in college; then encouraging the students to attend.
Student Activities Department, sometimes called Student Life Department or Student Life; Leadership, is really an event management department that rounds out their entire life in many ways. You don’t need a virtual reality program to supplement your daily activities in the campus community. You need real life events instead.
Events and Activities Create Success
Every time you create any of the following activities for students, they are learning life skills, gaining experience, and preparing for success:
- Organizational activities that occur in a fraternity or sorority that is service-oriented.
- Offering health classes, maybe not for credit but for their interest. An example could be on health remedies for acne, different types of ways to get into fitness, fun dance classes, how to stay happy no matter what, and progressive relaxation (the Jacobsen method).
- Campus clubs that focus on leadership development.
- Campus social movements based on a social cause closest to the heart.
- Fun classes on subjects that seem trivial.
- Activities that decrease stress (be the first campus to set up a salt chamber), deal with social exclusion, offer more music options, strategize on alternative energy sources and even build them, encourage multiculturalism, and take a look at a day’s work in occupational safety and health.
- Offer business classes and let them try their hand at a business opportunity.
- Develop skills in music whether it’s for singing, writing music, or playing a musical instrument, and then applying for an internship at the National Endowment for the Arts.
- Include them in as many research projects on campus (ones that could not possibly harm your health in any way) and learn how research is done.
- Encourage getting a double major and even a double minor in seemingly unrelated topic areas for a better future. Its the combination of seemingly unrelated things that often brings innovation.
- Encourage them to attend local festivals during every season of the year to really get a flavor of what it’s like living in that part of the country (United States or elsewhere)
- Mentorship in how to take a business idea from start to finish. With a business or social media idea, steps would be taken to go through the entire process of creating an invention or innovation (even if they have a disability), and testing it with a research team. Setting up a website with web pages, business email, download information, and hyperlinks is always part of the process. Creating an online identity and brand name is also included.
But don’t stop there. Drum up news and interest on campus for them, do some event management and send out party invitations for your closest support group to meet at a local restaurant on a certain calendar date. Truly help them as mentors do. Then make sure they set up their own policy and procedure manual and do promotion marketing and training. Of course, technical support or a computer program or mobile app for the smartphone is also important as is steering them in the right direction to obtain licensure information if needed. This could help them develop a partnership and be set for the next 20 years of life. The service you do for them will go down in history as the #1 life-changing event of their lives.
Encourage them to take courses for professional certification as well. You don’t have to wait until after college to become certified. They will have learned an immense amount of information that will only help them in whatever career chosen. All the service offered to them during the process made them become the best person they could be.
Setting the seeds for students’ success after college can be a fun and creative process. Besides that, it’s very satisfying to the soul. Employment departments will see their leadership development skills, interests, and competencies and that they utilized the natural resources in their environment. They enhanced their communication skills with wide groups of people, adults and children alike; a skill essential for life. They built their business skills in many areas simultaneously.
They may have enhanced their dating life simply because of all the hundreds of people they are/were meeting. The greater the number of people, the greater their chances are of meeting their life partner.
In College, Let Them Make Mistakes
College life is the place to make all the mistakes before progressing to “real life”. What™s more important is stretching their mental boundaries and letting them have the foundational belief that they can do something – and make mistakes without fear.
The safety net backing them is you are professionals and professors and experts in dozens of areas of expertise and with dozens of years of experience. You are willing to share what you have learned with them. You are ready to observe their creativity and praise them for it.
Sororities, Fraternities and Service Type of Clubs
College campuses have plenty of established events already in progress and scheduled on the calendar for students to attend. But have you evaluated them? What is missing? And who is working with individual students to make sure they participate?
Sororities and fraternities may be one of your students’ interests. These organizations offer a lot of opportunities that are social, educational, leadership oriented, philanthropic, or service-oriented. These types of organizations tend to be exclusive and have restrictions on who may or may not join. In some regards, you want a student left out strategy that includes those that don’t make the cut, so to speak.
What will you do about chemical substances that may be offered at any party on campus? Sure, it’s their choice whether or not to participate in them, but how can you go beyond what is required and really care enough to make a difference? There could be lives you end up saving as a result.
Civic engagement organizations are leadership oriented as well. They attempt to protect and promote a democratic society and broaden their scope to include the surrounding community. Student government organizations help build character. How can more students get involved?
Service clubs cover a number of different potential topics. Here’s a sample list of what may be on your school campus:
- Academic and educational clubs for volunteers to help tutor other students
- Community service organizations such as ones that help the elderly with home and yard cleanup
- Multicultural clubs that focus on increasing diversity
- Religious and spiritual organizations that always focus on service as well as leadership.
Sports events are exceptionally popular events to attend on campus. Check out the university sports team schedules on the college website. With the “no student left behind” principle, how can you reach out to those that don’t make the sports teams? And who is reaching out to various demographics on campus that need a good way to release some tension?
The options are endless.
Summary
College life is more than classroom learning of one course or a whole curriculum. It’s the environment to practice and learn leadership. Create enough solid student life activities and events so they can attend and grow their life skills. In the end, each one of them will become part of the alumni community, spreading awareness of your higher education institution.