MMFBT 014 – Benefits Of Getting Involved In Student Government

Happy New Year everyone!

The More Money for Beer and Textbooks Podcast is raring to go in 2014 with the goal of helping young Canadians and their parents across Canada with this whole post-secondary deal.

While we certainly have not run out of top-shelf guests for the program, we decided to take  brief hiatus from interviewing other people and have Justin and I give everyone the straight goods for a couple episodes.

For our 14th installment we chat about why it’s useful to get involved in student government no matter what campus you go to.  All too often students fall into this weird trap of going to 1 or 2 political science classes and becoming experts on all things political – only to use that confidence and “knowledge” to do nothing but criticize their student government.  That’s a trend we would really like to see curtailed.  Getting involved with how your campus, faculty, or residence is ran is a positive thing just from a values standpoint, and has undeniable character-building benefits.

If all of that squishy character stuff isn’t your thing, there are many personal gains to be gotten from dealing with student government as well.  You’ll hear Justin and I explain how our experiences (especially in Justin’s case) really shaped our student lives (for the better).  It provided us with a bevy of skills, but even more importantly it allowed us to leave school with many authentic connections (we’ll explain the different between authentic and inauthentic connections) and some really cool network-building experience.  You can pretty much draw a direct line from these experiences to our ability to immediately find employment upon graduation, and we know this was the case for many of the people we worked with as well.

Getting involved has some other material perks as well.  Looking for a little extra cash or maybe even the odd free adult beverage?  Student government is pretty famous for finding ways to finesse these tokens of gratitude into the equation.

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On the flip side dealing with a populace that is notoriously critical and sometimes unreliable can carry a high degree of difficulty if you’re not prepared.  Justin and I will share some lessons we learned the hard way and explain how to go about getting started in student government.

As always, if you have any comments we’d love to hear them.  Your experience is why we do this whole thing so let us know what’s working and where you might envision some improvements.

Until next time – More Beers More Cheers That’s It That’s All!