What was missing
The student association is the university’s official student union. The year before me, COVID had made it quiet. I was the first president after restrictions started lifting, so the job was to take campus from a place where students weren’t allowed to meet to a place where they could finally get together.
It was also the university’s first year in its new building. There were no rules for starting a club, so students who wanted one had a hard time. There were no club budgets, no community spaces, no norms, and no events. We had to build a lot of it from scratch.
What I started
It was an elected role. I campaigned, won, and represented the whole student body: about 4,000 students, then 4,000 to 5,000 after a big intake halfway through the year.
We wrote the rules and procedures for starting a club, and a lot of clubs used them to get started. We also worked out how much budget each club gets. We ran everything that year without a budget, but we wanted the next generations to have one. We got there.
And we got water coolers installed all over campus.
How people came together
We ran about 10 events that year. The bigger ones drew 70 to 100 students.
- A desert safari, one of the first events the university hosted.
- International Women’s Day.
- Red Bull Paper Wings. We partnered with Red Bull to bring a qualifier for its paper plane competition to campus. The winner could go on to the finals and compete for big prizes.
- Dubai Fitness Week. Dubai spends this week pushing everyone to get fit, so we created competitions and initiatives on campus to help students do exactly that.
Students on the student association’s desert safari trip.
What lasted
We started the annual club awards. They recognize clubs for what they achieved during the year. We created the first categories, and they’ve changed since to recognize what stands out each year.
The university still holds them every year. The year after, the ACM chapter I founded won two of them.
The first annual club awards, and me hosting them.