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There are a lot of benefits to attending a business school, including being provided with an education which will significantly benefit us and prepare us for entering the workplace. By paying hundreds of dollars each year as our Student Activity Fee, we each rightfully feel that we should be able to derive some value from the fee to focus it on events we would like to participate in. But one of the downsides to that is the massive number of students who want to create their own organizations and receive AIA funding, without looking to see if they can get involved in an existing organization.
This seems to be happening much more this year than it has in years past, but it seems to be a regular occurrence for the fall semester. ABA and AIA are required to do more work with either recognizing new organizations or specifying their reasoning for not recognizing a student organization. AIA’s and ABA’s job should focus on approving and creating organizations for the long term, with stability and demand that will last for decades.
A stir was created earlier this semester when ABA informed Her Campus, an up and coming online magazine for women, that they would be better suited by partnering with the Women’s Center. Her Campus wanted to start their own organization and not be directly integrated with the Women’s Center according to a member of ABA.
However, Her Campus ultimately approached the Women’s Center about an integration which eventually fell through according to a member of the Women’s Center.
Other organizations, such as the Bentley Consulting Club and Falcon Foodies are also pending ABA recognition.
With everyone looking to strengthen their own resumes by being the “founder” of an on-campus organization, few studentse looking at the existing opportunities for them to create and build their own area within an existing organization. When several students were looking to start a political forum last year, they realized they wouldn’t be able to join the Democrats or the Republicans because it would make them appear partial to one side or the other. Instead, they joined the Speech and Debate Society and found a natural fit within that organization.
Bentley doesn’t need yet another fraternity or sorority on campus because you believe yours will promote business better than DSP does. Instead, we challenge you to enhance the organizations that Bentley already has established and strengthen them one organization at a time. Besides, that would be a much better story for an interview, about how you approached an issue and you affected change within an established group, than just circumvented the group entirely and created yet another organization.
John Karakelle and Ian Markowitz, board members of The Vanguard, are both members of the Bentley Speech and Debate Society.
{ 1 comment }
First off I’m a male, so I’ll give to you from my perspective.
Well just to clarify if you really pay attention to Bentley’s principles or not, what happened to if there’s no organization you like, create one. I really think the premise of this article was not to inform but to hurt. Clearly, the vanguard feels inferior to Her campus giving them competition in the sense that if I saw the two papers side by side, I’d pick Her-campus, because primarily the articles written in her campus are more relevant to the lives of college students while the Vanguard just writes what important people do. The writers of Her campus are college students and can give valuable insight to college life accurately because they are college students. Clearly, the article is invalid, and contradicts Bentley beliefs. Sadly enough, the information provided is not backed up accurately with no accurate sources, and is pretty slanderous to Her campus. Isn’t the whole point of coming to college is to go beyond the norm and start something new, I mean school newspapers aren’t anything new, are they?
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