By Ashley Mussbacher (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: January 29, 2014
One of my first jobs was filing eviction documents for a run-down property management company. My favourite task in the office was to create paperwork for anyone and everyone, because it would give me something to do.
This is exactly like UFV’s co-curricular record: an attempt to make the administration more effective at the expense of efficiency and economy.
Don’t get me wrong — students should always be encouraged to dive into activities on campus. Getting involved in any way, be it a volunteer governance or co-op position, is a great way to build experience for the ultimate graduation portfolio. Involvement looks good on a resume, and it feels great knowing you’ve contributed to the community even if it’s in a small way.
So if the CCR is just there to encourage students to get involved, it suggests a question: what’s wrong with the old-fashioned curriculum vitae? When you start looking for work after graduation, you’re going to have to put together a CV anyway — it’s basically a resumé on steroids, listing everything you’ve written, published, edited, or researched.
Where the CV focuses on the academic, it makes sense that the CCR takes a more community-minded listing.
But does it?
After a browse through the CCR system online, it quickly becomes clear that not all campus activities and unpaid positions are listed.
For instance, it turns out that none of the general rep positions for student associations are available for selection, even in the advanced search menus. As far as the CCR is concerned, if you’re not in an executive position, your job doesn’t exist. You can get the organizer of the association to add the position, but this is where we see the extra paperwork again for both student and administrator: both are wasting time, but only one of them is getting paid for it.
The CCR appeals to students who intend to search for employment after graduation — so that would, hopefully, be all students — by reinventing the wheel in the form of an extra-curricular list you can hand over to employers or use in applying for a master’s degree. The only problem: if you already intend on adding your activities to your resume, the CCR is completely redundant. Most master’s degree applications only accept the bare minimum of paperwork. If you have to put all the pertinent information in a single word document, why bother with a CCR?
Since I like to keep everything super-organized and on-record, I suppose the CCR is good for keeping track of even the smallest detail of my co-curricular activities.
But that’s assuming they’re included on the system’s menu.
