Student Community Value : Pulling The Members

As I learnt, that human tend to group. This mindset maybe come for a fact that people can fulfill
their needs solely. They need other people to achieve bigger and broader benefits. But when it
comes to student community in micro scale such as study program student community, what
kind of needs and benefits do the members are going for?
Currently, I see that a student community helds events and trainings to the 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 attribute that they might learn from the campus.
However, I see that the characteristic development of student community are going through a
path that I believe will be no longer be the same as what I have 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 it as “semangat berhimpun” that pushes the member morally to
contribute further and deeper to the community has been slowly fade away. Personally, I don’t
think it is a negative manuver for the character development. But to see that the developmented
character are “forced” to fit in a unmodified (yet) community model based on previous version
are hard to expect it will give good outcomes.
“semangat berhimpun” as I mention, are changing to a liberal characteristic. As so many
opportunities that can be used as vessels to develop skills for the student opened, student
communty is not a primer option to be choosed anymore. Therefore, student tend to participate
and contribute to the community outside of student community or campuses.
Is it bad? No, as I said before, I am completely a proponent for the idea that every students have
to be given free will to choose what they do during their study. But, student community might be
delayed to catch and suit the development of their members. The design of the community
doesn’t suit with the member needs. The threshold forces of the community might be
misscalculated. Available forces are smaller than potential forces because the forces are spread
or tend to contribute to variety opportunities outside the community. As a result, the one that
experiencing degradation is the community. They potentially missed their target and getting
smaller attention through the times.
Well, I think that a radical evaluation need to be set. We need to adding new variables to the
design of student communities. We cannot depend on “What is missed by previous year period?”
kind of evaluation but also “What do I missed now?” and “What will I missed then?” to remodel
the community to dynamically fit the needs from multi-period times.
I have concerned about what actually attract community member to participate to the inside. I
realize that a student community is first layered on academic needs. To fulfill the needs they
build communities to carry out academic-benefit-based events. So in a long term, student union
will always stand firm for that reason. But, what about other aspects such as organization
regeneration, leadership, social services, non-academic, internal, and external relationship
events? Well, I found out that these are the secondary layer. These aspects’ benefits can be
gotten by students from outside student community. Other vessels and opportunities provide
many events that can give same benefits even bigger on those aspects.
When I say about layers above, I don’t think that student communities have to carry out training
and seminar all the time. That must be a boring community to join. I found out that it can be a
concerning issue if student communities do not know their uniquity and even put it on their
programs. What I mean is that student community has it unique attributes on their academic
background. To maintain the community attraction, they have to always sell those attributes.
Student community can do a lot of things, but if it doesn’t contain any academic attribute, it will
lose it attractiveness. For example, social service can be done as simple as giving foods to poor
people and orphans or maybe cleaning beaches. However, neighborhood community can also do
the same. So what is the difference? Leadership training can be held by every student community
and also external community such as upgrading skill and education platforms. Then, what is
stopping the members to choose the other platform than their own student communities?