NEWSBYSCOTT WARREN

This is part 8 of an 11-part series on Undergraduate Social Entrepreneurship coordinated by the Social Innovation Initiative at Brown University. This post's author is Scott Warren, Executive Director and Co-Founder of Generation Citizen.

As a junior in college, I landed myself in a position for which I immediately felt under-qualified: serving as the director of STAND, a student organization working to end the atrocities in Darfur and create a permanent anti-genocide constituency. STAND is comprised of over 800 college and high school chapters and uses a structure of over 40 volunteers and two permanent staffers to organize, plan campaigns and conduct advocacy. At the onset, I found myself overwhelmed, unsure of how to effectively lead, and challenged to effectively balance my work with my academics -- let alone my social life.

The challenges of running an organization while a student are myriad. High school and college teach us intellectual truths and challenge us to think critically, but not how to lead or run an organization. (Possibly because nothing teaches you about running an organization like actually running an organization.) Accordingly, while I consulted with others and read books to attempt to learn more about leadership, nothing replaced the on-the-job-training.

One of the main challenges of running an organization as a student is legitimacy: it's hard to get people to take you seriously as a 20-something year old.