Well, with my selected student org having their meeting at 5 on Wednesday (1 hour is not nearly enough time to process and write a blog) and with all of my student org meetings being cancelled this week, I'll be looking at good old Sigma Phi Epsilon as my observed student org.
Last night, I took some mental notes of things that many may consider "unconventional". I tried to look at it through my other involvement lenses.
The first thing that stuck out as different was the way brothers interacted. Many points of the meeting were interrupted with sarcasm or a quick joke from brothers seated around the room. These interruptions definitely broke speaking order and were just for the sake of cracking a joke and were not beneficial to the point being made. This practice was modeled by our president who himself interrupted and cracked a few jokes. While this may not lead to effective meeting strategy, it definitely made the chapter meeting more enjoyable. Our organization is based on relationships between its members and this practice, although detrimental to a meeting structure, definitely exhibits the value of relationships between members, and I think lead to an overall positive experience in what could be a long, drawn out meeting.
Powerpoint was used to highlight upcoming homecoming events, adding to the excitement level in the room. The visuals (lined with jokes that had nothing to do with homecoming at a few brothers expenses but all in good fun) made the presentation much more exciting and less boring as it could have potentially been.
During the meeting, our advisor stood up and told us that the Rec Sports community will be helping us with our upcoming service event, showing that support within the campus community does, in fact, exist for our organization. The members were very excited by this as many felt it affirmed the work that we do as a fraternity.
Our current chapter president has said that he wanted to change the culture of chapter meetings, and I believe he successfully has as previous presidents were much more serious in their approach to meeting structure, which was much more efficient than the current structure but came at the cost of being much less enjoyable.
Overall, this was a very interesting experience that gave me a much deeper insight into the culture of my organization and how to effectively work as a member.
Hey Stephen, I love your analysis of the use of humor during the organization's meeting. I agree that sometimes humor is necessary instead of detrimental. Also, your view of looking at such a relaxed, familiar organization versus other organizations where members may not know each other as well is very interesting. I look forward to learning how you look at other organizations with your fraternity lens when we do our final presentations. -Breanna
ReplyDelete