Student Community Value: Pulling The Members

As I learned, humans tend to group. This mindset may come from the fact that people can fulfill their needs alone. They need other people to achieve bigger and broader benefits. But when it comes to student communities on a microscale, such as study program student communities, what kind of needs and benefits are the members going for?

Currently, I see that a student community holds events and trainings for its members. Not just a linear kind of those but also cross-sector. They try to contribute intensively to people inside and outside of the community by using their unique attributes that they might learn from the campus.

However, I see that the characteristic development of the student community is going through a path that I believe will no longer be the same as what I had before. 

Of course, as time goes by, the needs have been changing and will always be changing naturally. But there is something that I think I would call "semangat berhimpun" that pushes the member morally to contribute further and deeper to the community that has slowly faded away. 

Personally, I don't think it is a negative move for character development. But to see that the developed characters are "forced" to fit in an unmodified (yet) community model based on the previous version is hard to expect to result in good outcomes.

"Semangat berhimpun," as I mentioned, is changing to a liberal characteristic. As there are so many opportunities that can be used as vessels to develop skills for the student, the student community is not a prime option to be chosen anymore. Therefore, students tend to participate and contribute to the community outside of the student community or campus.

Is it bad? No. As I said before, I am completely a proponent of the idea that every student has the freedom to choose what they do during their studies. But the student community might be delayed to catch and suit the development of their members. 

The design of the community doesn't suit the needs of the members. The threshold forces of the community might be miscalculated. Available forces are smaller than potential forces because the forces are spread or tend to contribute to a variety of opportunities outside the community. As a result, the community is the one experiencing degradation. They potentially missed their target and got less attention through the years.

Well, I think that a radical evaluation needs to be set. We need to add new variables to the design of student communities. We cannot depend on the "What is missed by the previous year period?" kind of evaluation but also on "What do I miss now?" and "What will I miss then?" to remodel the community to dynamically fit the needs of multi-period times.

I am concerned about what actually attracts community members to participate on the inside. I realize that a student community is first layered on academic needs. To fulfill their needs, they build communities to carry out academic-benefit-based events. 

So in the long term, student unions will always stand firm for that reason. But what about other aspects such as organization regeneration, leadership, social services, and non-academic, internal, and external relationship events? Well, I found out that these are the secondary layers. These aspects' benefits can be gotten by students from outside the student community. Other vessels and opportunities provide many events that can give the same benefits, even bigger in those aspects.