Ready. Set. Fall...

Where did the summer go? There was a time when summer in higher education meant rest, time to plan, and even some time at the beach. Now, most colleges and universities offer summer terms and student affairs administrators and staff usally have to stick around for much of it.

This increased summer action mainly relates to institutions trying to use their facilities more efficiently and to students wanting to complete their degrees sooner than later (to save time and money).

Still, let's admit it: who else, behinds those in academia, get weeks off at a time and every federal holiday, not even counting normal vacation days, sick leave, and "comp" time.

At ASGA, we take Fridays off from May to August. So everyone works extra hard the rest of the week to keep up with our workloads. I admit that it's great to have an extra weekend day to rest, spend time with the family, and to travel/visit with family and friends. Fall is coming, and that means lots of travel for me to ASGA's conferences, not to mention consulting trips to several member institutions.

It's still stinking hot in Florida (actually we just started the heat of summer), but it's beginning to look a lot like fall around the office as we get ready for the fall semester rush.

No more "status quo"

Most of us keeping doing what you've been doing. Why? It's easier than innovating, creating, taking risks to create something new. Trying new things involves the potential, maybe even likelihood, of it not succeeding exactly as we envision.

But we grow as leaders and our organizations improve when we strive to be better.

For example, ASGA discovered a new way to gather information that we store in our SG Database which include information on every student government in America. Our team literally researches information on every college and university in the nation, one at a time. It's time-consuming, exhaustive work. In the past, each of our data-entry team members might, on a good day, be able to complete research on five institutions.

However, in the last month, we experimented with a new system. This new system has led to us tripling our production. Each of now can complete 15 schools on a good day. This mean updating as many as 75 institutions a day. With 5,000 colleges and universities in the nation, we ideally need to be updating data on every institution twice a year. we were barely getting through once a year using the old ways. Now it's more realistic to get through the nation twice a year. That's exciting. We're better able to serve our members with better data on student governments everywhere.

Changing our methods was risky and potentially could have caused problems. But the risk paid off. ASGA is much deeper and more accurate now as a result.

All of us in Student Government must be willing to take risks when the reward and result could better serve our constituents. We can't be content with the status quo.

Sweet Home Alabama

Leaving in the morning for a consulting/training trip to Auburn University's Montgomery campus. I'm facilitating their SGA training retreat at a 4H camp. Looking forward to helping this member institution.

It's a privilege to serve Student Governments and be trusted to provide them with information, advice, and training. I don't take this responsibility lightly.

In preparation for going, I spoke with two administrators and the SGA president in some depth, to learn about their problems and issues and specifically want they must want to learn, and what they most need to learn.

They asked me to do some "leadership" training, but my specialty is student government and that's what they're getting when they bring me to work with them. I'm Mr. Student Government and that means everything I talk with them about is on how they can improve their Student Government this year.

If everything goes as planned, I'll be home Sunday early morning (1 or 2 a.m.). I plan to drive straight through. It's seven hours there and back. But I've learned that if it would take eight hours to drive, you're better off driving than flying, particularly in my case. There is no cost-efficient airport within minutes of my home, so I have to drive two hours to Orlando, Jacksonville, or Tampa to get more palatable fares. So when I think how long it will take to drive, and wonder if I could save time by flying, I have to build in four hours of driving to any airport, plus another hour or more of "waiting" time. My rule is I drive when it is under 8 hours.