Well, one of the activities I got involved in early on
was I was part of the founding group of a fraternity here,
Phi Delta Theta fraternity,
so that took a lot of our time. We were creating from scratch
a chapter of a fraternity and part of the reason for that was
there were already nearly two dozen fraternities on campus
but a lot of students who were involved in student leadership in one fashion or another,
who knew each other, a lot of us were friends anyway or at least acquaintances,
wanted to start something that was new, that would be unique to us.
One of the advantages of joining an existing fraternity is it's already in place;
one of the disadvantages is you inherit whatever baggage or reputation, for ill or for good,
that it may have, and we wanted to really do our own thing.
It was a great experience. I think doing things like that really help you in your professional life later,
which you don't think about at the time,
but you have to organize a lot of the business side of an organization
if it's not already in place. You're creating the by-laws, you're establishing the rules of the road,
you're establishing recruitment policies and procedures, you're establishing eligibility for membership,
you're helping set standards on what kind of people you're looking to bring in
and how broad or how limited that's going to be.
You are trying to build out a reputation for being strong not just in one area, like academics or sports,
but to be really strong across the board,
and we were able to do that very early on, so we won a lot of awards and campus recognition in the early days,
sort of set the standard for ourselves and an expectation, and it was compelling
to have the opportunity to do it and see the fruits of our labor pretty quickly.
So I'd say the last thing on that is you learn very quickly that you can't be irresponsible for long
because if you are you're letting down an entire group of people.
If you have a job to do and you don't if affects others,
sometimes financially, sometimes in terms of their calendar,
sometimes in terms of their just general expectations of what they think is going to happen,
and it doesn't take too often of making the mistake of falling down on the job
to quickly learn that even at a young age being responsible, being reliable,
following through on details and so on, is very important and those are terrific lessons in general.