When I came to Olin in Fall of 2021, it was the tail end of the pandemic and clubs were starting to rebuild from the previous year. I am an avid coffee drinker, and Acronym was a large part of the reason why I chose Olin. Joining Acronym allowed me to deepen friendships and get to know older students who I wouldn’t have spoken to otherwise. As a senior, the majority of first years that I interact with are the active Acronym members. I don’t believe that this is a unique experience, and clubs have been the most important experience for me to engage with the Olin community. 

At the beginning of my sophomore year, a friend and I were told that we were now in charge of Acronym. We were told that we could no longer use the Admissions desk, and changed the location to the library. Through the location change, we doubled attendance and made Acronym a space for casual conversations with professors and course assistants. 

At this point, Acronym was classified as an organization. All organizations had to exist for at least a year and received a budget. Clubs were generally smaller and met less often. Clubs had to request money from CCO whenever they wanted to spend, as they were not given a budget. In the ‘22-’23 school year, there were only twelve organizations and twenty-two clubs. 

After running Acronym, I wanted to join CCO to help provide others with the same positive experience that I had from my clubs. I was the Vice Club Chair last year and was the Club Chair until my resignation last semester. My job as Vice Club Chair was to fill out reimbursement forms for all of the clubs, and I normally processed only a couple hundred dollars a week. Last year was the first year that CCO got rid of the clubs and orgs structure, and every group received a budget. There were forty-two groups last year, with an overall budget of $28,000. Most groups did not receive enough money, and the student activity fee was increased. 

This year, there are sixty registered groups that receive funding from CCO and the overall budget is $55,000. My job was to work with the Vice Club Chair to allocate budgets, process all p-card payments, and make sure groups are spending their money. I also ended up filling out reimbursement forms, and all reimbursement requests were completed up to my resignation. I was processing thousands of dollars each week and constantly stressed over making sure I was filling out forms correctly. 

I received limited support from the Student Government Advisors. There was a significant amount of misspending in the fall, and the advisors were too busy to help me. They also asked me to not use the Honor Board to deal with misspending, because they told me they would handle it. They completely forgot about helping me for a month, and more incidents kept happening. 

I was spending at least 20 hours per week doing CCO work. I devalued my homework, wasn’t able to apply to grad school, and delayed my search for full-time jobs. On the date of my resignation, I received an email from my design depth professor saying that I didn’t have enough completed assignments to pass the class, which means I wouldn’t graduate. I was considering resigning for two weeks and this email solidified my decision to resign. I was able to catch up on work, and I am on track to graduate this spring.

This shouldn’t be allowed to happen. Student Government should not be burning students out the way it has this year. 

For Staff:

1. Hire a full-time person to support Student Government. Stop making students do the work of full-time employees. Be upfront about your bandwidth to help students. 
2. Pay Student Government positions. Students involved lose time to have other paid positions or take more classes.
3. Hire a new Academic Life Administrative Assistant.

For Students:

1. Be more understanding and respectful when engaging with CORe.
2. Go back to the clubs and orgs system. Cap the number of student groups allowed. There does not need to be this many groups for a student body this small. This needs to be done through a constitution change, as the advisors are not willing to deny creation of groups. 
3. Do not allow for a system that might compromise students ability to graduate and have a future after Olin.
4. Blame the system for the current reimbursement procedure. There are many reimbursements to be done, but individual students don’t cause the underlying problems of CORe. 
5. Recognize when something is causing harm to your wellbeing and stop doing it.