SALP, free tickets (Suzanne)

By popular request, an FAQ about SALP!

Here goes:

What the heck is SALP?
SALP stands for the Student Ambassador Leadership Program. It’s basically a program where the university takes students, gives them training, gets them to do community service, and declares them leaders afterwards.

Who’s it for?
Second year students and above.

So, um, why did you do it in first year?
Music students are lazy bums (or exclusively dedicated to their art; whichever you prefer). If you want to recruit them for a leadership program, you need to do it in first year when they’re still enthusiastic. Along with Architecture, Building and Planning (all one faculty), Vet Science, and something else I can’t remember, Music is one of the faculties that lets their first years do it too.

How do they pick the students?
Beats me. A friend of mine who volunteered to be a faculty rep for SALP told me that older SALPers like her pick the new ones, though she’s not really sure whether her choices get to be the final selections and thinks they go through a vetting process with the faculty as well.

Cool. What do you have to do?
It basically tallied up like this:
– 13 seminars (during lunchtime)
– Two workshops (one in the evening during semester, and one during the holidays. You can sign up for more, and usually it’s worth it to do so)
– An overnight camp
– A day camp
– A group project (which will count towards either your university or your community engagement hours. Or neither, and you can research leadership theory with your group instead. Why you would do this is really beyond me)
– 40 hours of community service (you have to do it all with one organisation)
– 20 hours of service to the university (can scatter it throughout different activities)
… all of which is spread out over slightly more than a year.

Wow. That sounds like a lot.
Actually, it really isn’t. They’re pretty flexible with deadlines as long as you tell them beforehand — I was supposed to graduate a month ago (whoops), but I got an extension. You can also skip seminars and make up for it by doing more university service hours. Two hours cover a seminar or a camp, four hours cover a workshop. The maximum you can trade off in this way is ten hours. It’s mostly an unobtrusive commitment, too: forty hours disappears pretty quickly; several people I know got a full time volunteer position over a holiday and finished their community service in a week.

Great. Now that I know stuff about SALP, tell me why I should sign up for this.
It looks good on your CV. No, seriously. You also get to know a pretty cool group of people really well. The training’s helpful, although the quality of the seminars varies. And you get access to lots of advice, information, and a whopping great database, so if you’re interested in volunteering but don’t know where to start it’s a great way to get involved. I am told that certain faculties also treat their SALPers really well and invite them to interesting events. Unfortunately, mine both pretty much ignored me.

Also, after you graduate, you get to do a number of cool SALP-related things, like be a Faculty SALP rep, or help out the new SALPers, or be on the committee that organises social events.

Social events? Tell me more!
Do I look like the kind of person who has a social life? I don’t really go to these. There are a lot of them, and they involve free food, though. Sometimes I drop by and steal some of it. There’s a lot of informal socialising, though, and it’s not uncommon to meet up with your group for coffee/dinner every once in a while.

What’s the catch?
Paperwork. It’s a pain. You’ve got to document your hours. Admittedly, there aren’t too many forms. But for me, any is too many.

Any other cons?
The idealism of some of the other SALPers can get really, really, annoying if you’re a pragmatist (read: pessimist) like me. Also, some of the seminars were a little bit on the intellectually shallow side (seriously, you do not need to spend an hour discussing who your favourite leader is and why, especially not when everyone in the room picks Mother Theresa for exactly the same reasons. Also, leadership theory and organisational psychology are pretty much pseudo-scientific bullshit in my book [which is why I would never pay to go to business school :P], and I didn’t like how much the seminars were based on theories of questionable scientific validity), though of course a lot of them were really good too (I really enjoyed the ethics seminar where one of the philosophy professors came to give a talk on Kant).

What was your favourite part?
The SALP newsletter. Seriously, it was an awesome newsletter. It did a really good job of keeping you up to date on all the things happening around campus, interesting guest lectures, volunteer opportunities. As much as I’d like to give a better sounding answer, the newsletter was genuinely my favourite part of the experience, because it was a really good newsletter, and I am a massive newsletter fangirl. The resource centre’s pretty good for the same reasons – you’re pretty much always in the loop about all the things you can do to make a difference on campus if you’re in SALP.

Oh, wait, I actually do have a decent answer: the workshops during the holidays. On one of them, we took a walking tour around Melbourne with a non-profit organisation. So they took us through these seedy back alleys, pointed out the poverty, drugs, graffiti, and told us the story behind all of it and what they were doing to combat it. Pretty eye-opening, heavy stuff.

So what did you do during the war SALP?
For my group project, we got people around uni to come tree-planting with us. That also covered all my university service hours. For community engagement, I tutored refugee kids.

Final comments?
Ultimately, it’s a program that gives you as much as you put into it. It’s a pretty good program, but the emphasis is really on doing things yourselves, or with your group. Generally, because of this, it’s also not a massive amount of work unless you’re really gung ho about it. It’s a nice little package to facilitate things like leadership and volunteering, but in my opinion the people who benefit most from this program tend to be people who’d be able to get leadership experience and take advantage of volunteer opportunities anyway.

Anyway. Enough about SALP. Yesterday I went to see Arabella with Opera Australia – got free tickets from 19th Century class. Free tickets are basically the best thing about being a music student – all sorts of productions donate to the Con, so you can get into many places for pretty drastically reduced prices. It was a great production, but it was probably a bad idea to spend three and a half hours at the opera when so many things are due.

I had an aural test for Techniques 1-1 today. Pretty easy, even on the really out of tune piano in the lecture hall (that’s the great thing about having relative pitch which doesn’t pick up subtle differences in intonation – makes dictation a breeze even if the instrument’s crap). Hopefully it’ll make up for the slightly average grades I’ve been getting on the assignments.