Team Experience

During my time as President, I learned that it is important to find a balance between flexibility and clear goals/expectations for my team. Since we are a student organization, I am understanding of people’s many time commitments and busy schedules. However, I found that if I didn’t set clear goals for my leadership/exec team and the Project Managers, little progress would be made on improving the organization. Communication is important for all group settings, but I learned that constant communication is especially necessary for student organizations. Since a lot of the work we have to do as a leadership team involves reaching out to members, event planning staff, and sponsors, I emphasized that giving little updates to each other via Slack was really helpful. For example, if I was still waiting on a room reservation confirmation for our general meeting, I would make sure I made the others on my exec board aware of the delay. If our external outreach team was coordinating a sponsorship event from a company, I made it clear that they should keep the whole team updated.

I also learned to be open to new ideas and opportunities while I was the President of Project: Code. Whenever possible, I tried to open up the organization to partnering with other orgs. If someone reached out asking to advertise their club to our members, I was usually open to it – our main goal at Project: Code is to provide students opportunities to explore areas of CS, and if another org was able to provide that value, I was all for it.

Long-term planning was a challenging aspect of being the President of Project: Code. Before I was the President, I had never considered planning for routine organizational factors like meeting dates and times, room reservations, and milestone target dates for our projects. As President, I wanted to increase our project success rate, so I started from scratch when planning important dates for the org. I used a systems thinking approach to reflect on past semesters and determine the optimal timing for our various meetings and goals. I committed to including a “Project Midpoint Updates” meeting for both semesters, which would help keep members accountable to their project progress as well as give them a chance to see how much progress other project groups have completed.

Deciding on exact dates was challenging due to people’s busy school schedules – midterms, finals, and holidays make it even harder to find the optimal dates for our general meetings which typically have about 50-100 people in attendance. Additionally, there were times when the meeting room we requested was unavailable during our meeting time and our org was moved to a different room. In some cases, I was able to move the meeting date by a day or two so that we could be in the same room we usually hold meetings in. However, occasionally, we were only informed that the building and meeting room was different than usual a few days in advance, and we had no time to request a new room (since we had to create a room reservation ten days in advance). While this process was frustrating personally, I recognized that sometimes we just had to accept the change and quickly communicate with everyone in the club to notify them of the change. Essentially, I learned that even when I think I have a perfect long-term plan, things can change at the last minute, and I need to embrace the last-minute changes with flexibility and understanding.

Because I had been active in the organization since my freshman year, I had a deep understanding of the history of the org and its values. This helped me when redesigning some of the ways we kept track of people in the org and its active projects. With the help of my technical coding skills (many of which I learned throughout the past few years through this org!), I was able to redesign our website and include more information about the projects we hold, which helped us gain and retain new members throughout the semester. Additionally, I would describe myself as very organized, and my organizational skills helped in keeping track of the many projects we hosted. In fact, between Spring 2023 and Fall 2023, we more than doubled the amount of projects we were holding through our org. This increase came with a lot of new project managers and members, so I was able to leverage my organizational abilities to keep track of people and projects through a Notion dashboard which helps us stay on top of it all. By combining my personal history in the org with my technical and organizational skills, I was successful in increasing our club membership and retention, which was part of my goals as President.

Being the President of Project: Code significantly contributed to my understanding of the “Communication” competency I chose to develop. As President, I needed to lead large general meetings with close to 100 people and also lead smaller meetings with just Project Managers (about 10 people) or my exec team (5 people). Honestly, at the beginning, I felt that my abilities in clearly stating what needed to get done were not the best. But as the Fall 2023 semester progressed, I felt more and more confident in leading meetings, communicating with my exec board, and clearly articulating facts, opinions, and goals. I also feel that I became more of an active listener when people brought issues to my attention – I was more conscious of my responses as I always wanted everyone to feel seen and heard. 

I also became more aware of how other people within my organization communicated. At the beginning of each semester, we hold project manager interviews, which further honed my ability to communicate my expectations as well as understand someone’s past experiences. Additionally, during our general meetings, if a project manager’s presentation or updates were unclear, I made sure to ask follow up questions to better understand their project and what they had done so far. Overall, I had a multitude of opportunities to practice my communication skills, and I feel I have become a better listener and communicator during my time as President of Project: Code.