1. Opportunity to meet people. University may seem overly task and grade focused if you don’t find ways to enhance your University experience with other activities. Student club is a perfect place to meet people that you may otherwise not meet on campus. They may be from different majors or from different years and overall just people that you do not gravitate toward naturally. This is a great opportunity to meet people based on your interest, and develop these interests into passions together.
2. Develop your soft skills. Yes you can make an argument that being in university alone develops your soft skills and perhaps many things that involve dealing with people develop your soft skills and that you don’t really need to join a professional student club to improve them. However, being involved in something that you are passionate about and that you enjoy doing and learning about will certainly give you motivation to participate and get the most out of your involvement. For example, you can certainly exercise at home, but being in the gym will give you extra motivation for reaching your set targets. That’s an interesting slogan: “Professional student club, it’s like a gym for your interests”
3. Crystallize your interests and career objectives. Building on the previous point, leaning into your interests would enable you to find out more about the profession. The more you learn about different specializations of your profession the more determined you become as your goal in your career becomes clearer. You are starting to paint a big picture perspective for yourself, and most of all you start to figure out which place you would like to fit yourself in after graduation.
4. Network with people in your industry. Professional student clubs are usually somehow connected to outside organizations, either through personal connections or more formal sponsorships and partnerships. This is a good setting to meet the people from these organizations. Also, and perhaps more important are the connections made at the council, as your colleagues have seen you in action and likely have plenty of good things to say about you. Also they are likely to be in the same field of work as you, so that just increases your network of professionals.
5. Improve your grades. Although surprising but virtually guaranteed correlation exists between being involved in a student professional student club and the scholarly achievements. Usually people that are involved with professional student clubs are the people that prefer to stay busy and hence are good at prioritizing their tasks. This quality is certainly developed rather than innate, as I can say with certainty that I have developed that trait myself when I was involved in the professional student clubs and studies and worked part time. The key here is to find the balance and maintain the focus on pursuing your passion.
To find out more about the clubs that I was involved in you can view my LinkedIn profile, which is connected to the badge on the right hand side of this page. Feel free to connect with me over LinkedIn if you wish.
