VP Emerging Leaders Program

After attending Commencement, I have thought up some reasons for why the VP Emerging Leaders Program is cool:

1) There are some pretty exciting components to this, like:

• attending conferences, such as the UBC Student Leadership Conference (and if you are in Arts, they pay for you to go!),
• community service over Reading Week, or the Learning Exchange Trek program, and
• attending speaker series like the Terry Speakers Series — I went to the 100-Mile Diet last Friday and that was a.ma.zing. I was going to go to all of them anyway, but now this is an additional excuse to enjoy the Terry Speakers!

2) You get to meet some really passionate and outstanding students, including some really inspiring peer leaders. I am overwhelmed by the amount of things that others seem to be able to do at once. I want to be like that.

3) There is free food involved, like pizza at Commencement, and even more delicious, a dessert bar hosted by the Vanier leadership committee this Tuesday. I’m not sure if Totem has anything like that, but we definitely had a cake to die for.

Lastly, but definitely not least important, it stops me complaining so often about my lack of involvement, which I’m sure everyone will be grateful for!

If there’s anything I’m learning, it’s that you have to keep going out there to make things happen. I joined a bunch of clubs but most of them didn’t work out for me because of time clashes or a loss of interest. (This is another tip: don’t pay the membership fee until you are quite sure you want to be in this club. Sometimes it takes a couple of meetings to judge whether it’s something you really want to be doing.) Just being in a club isn’t enough: you have to be doing things.

I’ve also been indecisive about what I want to be involved in because there are so many things I am interested in. I didn’t want to miss out on something I might enjoy even more because of prior commitments. But now I realise I should just get involved in something — anything — that I like. It probably won’t be my lifelong passion and it might not work out, in which case, move on. But it’s the doing that matters.