My first August on Grounds, I received news of a holy gathering on the Lawn known to most as “The Activities Fair,” in which hundreds of clubs and organizations tried to garner new interest. I remember being accosted by upperclassmen who, clipboards in hand, would give me their 30-second spiel, extend a pen, and expect me to scribble down my email address. Signing up for plenty of organizations turned out to be one of the greatest decisions I have made in terms of furthering my education.
It may seem contradictory that time spent away from doing homework or studying could develop my engineering degree, but I would even argue that intentionally hand-picking certain clubs and organizations can greatly augment your classroom education. Having signed up for the full gamut of clubs and organizations my first year, I have tried to draw connections between the ones that are most enriching.
The link between the clubs that are most beneficial to my education is that they are “hands-on.” Before you dismiss this as engineer-specific advice and wander off to the next article, know that when I reference a “hands-on” organization, I do not mean that you must be building a widget, per se.
My three criteria an organization or team should meet to be considered hands-on are:
1.The main purpose of the group should be to develop a product or a production.
2.At least two-thirds of the members should be working on the deliverable — a final product — rather than just serving as group administration.
3.There should be a specific piece of the final product for which each member can claim responsibility.
Since these criteria are a little nebulous, allow me to list a few examples. On one end of the spectrum, I am on the Solar Car Team, which literally builds a physical product (a vehicle powered by the sun). This is a hands-on organization because the focus of the club is to develop a car to race. With the exception of some of the operations team, everybody’s work is in the domain of the product. Finally, all members can see how their work during workshops contributes to the final product, because the design decisions made depend on their research and presence.
Other examples of organizations that meet the hands-on criteria would be The Cavalier Daily, the Virginia Gentlemen, McIntire Investment Institute and First Year Players. For athletics, the “production” is the game, yet for primarily social organizations such as the Jefferson Literary and Debating Society, the product is enjoyment, which is not deliverable. The genres of these clubs are broad-ranging and clearly do not pertain to a certain major, yet all of these groups do a fantastic job of progressing classroom education.
What do the hands-on organizations offer that the others do not? Foremost, practice. Similar to how a lab session builds upon the concepts taught in lecture, hands-on experience outside the classroom solidifies the extraneous topics that may not be practiced enough in lab or with homework assignments.
Distinguishing hands-on organizations from purely recreational activities are the questions that one can generate — and subsequently learn from — when expected to overcome obstacles beyond contrived textbook problems. How can making tough-budget decisions such as choosing the number of days to print a newspaper be taught in a classroom? After a solar car workshop, it is not uncommon for members to need to ask faculty for advice on a peculiar challenge that went unsolved with the tools taught in lecture. The challenges from real-world scenarios are unique learning opportunities.
Please do not misinterpret my strong endorsement for hands-on organizations to mean that I discount the utility of organizations whose primary purpose is not to augment students’ education. There is no deliverable product that a fraternity works toward, yet it would be silly to think that there is no value to this non-hands-on organization, for example.
With the numerous advantages that experiential learning offers students, the University needs to dedicate more resources toward supporting these initiatives. Kelvin Wey, a manager of McIntire Investment Institute, said, “Members would greatly benefit from faculty training on the Bloomberg terminal in the School of Commerce.” Though the University has made moves to improve hands-on learning, with the unveiling of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences’ new experiential learning workshop scheduled for March 2013, we must not forget the importance of hands-on learning.
Andrew Kouri’s column appears bi-weekly Thursdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at a.kouri@cavalierdaily.com.
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