RSO's and Transaction Attributes

Throughout my academic career I have always tried to be involved on organizations that I believe aligned with my goals and aspirations. Of all the RSO’s I have been involved in, the one that impacted the most was actually not at University of Illinois, but at my previous institution, Community College of Lake County. There I was a member of the honors society Phi Theta Kappa and even though I was formally invited to be a member only the second semester of my freshman year, I knew I wanted to become more involved.  At the end of the year there were chapter officer elections and I was proud to be appointed Vice-President. 

           

The structure of the RSO calls out for eight positions on the board, but due to a limited recruitment on the previous year and the structure of community colleges, where most students transfer to a 4- year institution usually after 2 years, we started the year with only four. Those were President, VP of Leadership, Service and Public Relations Chair. We were not only shorthanded but the frequency of meetings was also being diminished to twice a month.
           

That caused a loss of interest and commitment on the part of the officers which generated uncertainty of the members that were being recruited. Other than committee meeting times, each officer had to hold 4 weekly hours in the office to attend to members and student questions. Without proper instruction and training, the office hours were basically study hall where instead of focusing on the organization, the officers would have lunch, do homework and hang out. This relates to the idea of opportunism and how the lack of proper monitoring or consequences incentives bad behavior in an organization. When invitations were sent out in October, the office phone blew up with intrigued students who had never heard of the organization or seen any events on campus and therefore wondered what this invitation was about and what the membership entailed. Long story short, Fall semester induction had only 20 members, falling over 200 short of the previous years. 

            

At the end of the semester, we did not only fall short on recruitment but also on the academic part of the organization.  In order to participate on the national PTK conference, each chapter had to write a research paper, and since we were focusing our attention and resources on trying to make up for the recruitment loss, we also fell behind on the research having to cram and finish what was supposed to a whole semester work in a single month. The cherry on top of the cake was that our President had been accepted into a 4 year university and transferred now leaving me, Vice President with the duties and responsibilities of leading the organization on the Spring. 

            

I took this role as a challenge and an opportunity to improve and fix some of the mistakes we had been making previously. I sat down with the board and we established the goals for our semester. What did we want to accomplish? Recruitment was the most important, followed by increasing our presence on campus. 

           

We often times got asked the question “Why should I join?” and while being part of a honors society is a very valuable asset to write on university applications, many students or even officers did not know that many Universities offered scholarships for PTK members. Therefore, our first action was to elect an additional officer to be devoted to finding PTK student scholarships at local/state year Universities. 

           

To address the question of uncertainty, we established duties and responsibilities for each board member and changed the board meeting times to once a week. It was imperative to keep everyone on the loop and on have that time to generate and diffuse new ideas.  And as a way of attracting new members we decided to connect with other RSO’s on campus that had similar objectives and academic goals to promote our organization.

           

We reach out to the Student Government in order to promote awareness about what DACA is and incentive DREAMERS to create a committee on the student government to work towards a more open and supportive community on campus. We also promoted our club by holding bake sales with Business and Math Club. As well as several service events at Feed my Starving Children. 

          
This was a work in progress that took several weeks of trial and errors with some unsuccessful events with low attendance to some great projects that increased the awareness on campus about not only what members could do for the organization, but also what the organization could do for them. At the end of the Spring semester, our induction ceremony had over 120 students. 

          

  I believe I can also relate this experience to the dimensions of transaction costs:

- Frequency of meetings solved the problem of opportunism since now we discussed every week what tasks were completed.

- The uncertainty problem was solved by assigning and making sure everyone knew what were their duties/ responsibilities.

- The lack of commitment could now be resolved my measuring the performance of the officers, and recognizing the ones who went above and beyond to promote and hold more events.

-  Also we found it helpful to connect with other organizations in order to promote our own.