The President of the Physics Club
My journey in the physics club was quite a thrilling one, it’s undoubtedly my biggest highlight during my study at KFUPM.
I was wondering how and where should I start? I believe we can start at the end. In my senior year, I was the leader of the Physics club. It was one of the most difficult years for students’ activities to bounce back after COVID. The Physics club didn’t have lots of members to begin with, so the expectations were not that high. For me, it was all about something different. Something very personal.
I have always been a leader, since my early days in life. I have always believed that I am not just a leader, but a great one with a natural instinct that cannot be matched by any type of education. I, however, haven’t been really tested according to my standards. I have been leader for multiple stuff here and there in middle & high school, but never have I ever had a challenge. The Physics club was my choice of test, if I lead this club into a huge success, then my internal beliefs are as good as I believe them to be.
So, I applied to be a president of the club without anyone contesting. I had no prior plans, my only plan was to activate as many people as I can around me. I got accepted, and so my journey begun. It’s worth mentioning that I did a lot of things that were inherited from the previous generations of the club’s leaders, which undoubtedly contributed to my success. I will, however, focus more on my experience.
The first thing I wanted to do is to make a clear structure, to distribute tasks to the most suitable and so on. I knew that delegating efficiently is very important, so I gave people tasks based on their strengths and I left with few ones, such as dealing with the university’s management and planning ahead.
Around then, I began interacting with my champion, my Elden Lord, the man behind the scenes, Mr. Ammar Alfaifi.
Mr. Ammar was a very energetic student, he was one of the very first people to join the club in 2018. He was an active participant through multiple presidencies, but his radiating energy never found a resonating cavity. Seeing him through these years taught me how a great of a contributor he can be, so I started working alongside him in his tasks, and I received all of his crazy ideas and made them reality. He was a gift that kept on giving.
We talked about writing a club tree to illustrate each executive and their tasks, these people have to enjoy their roles as they’ll serve their responsibilities. Around that time, House of the Dragons was airing its first season, and club members were thinking about using it as a theme for the club tree. We obliged internally, but changed it before posting, here is what it used to be:
Club’s Tree
“Who was the vice president?” you may ask, well, I wasn’t particularly a people’s person. I am good at reading them but very blunt to be bearable, and here comes the magic of the Hand, Mr. Mohammed AlAli. He was a very extroverted person, we met in English03 in the orientation year, without knowing that we will be major-mates. Almost all of the university knows him, and he knows them too! He was a perfect fit to compliment my weakness in these areas, he is always taking care of everything. All of the contributing members are, the club’s success is entirely their feat. I was a mere captain steering the ship.
I had a plan for running the first semester: Start the routine meetings and seminars to establish a sustainable pipeline of activities, and so we did. The first semester didn’t have any major events except one: Eclipse monitoring.
I had my first event one day walking to my classes: let’s make a big event of monitoring the Eclipse, we are the Physics club and that’s right within our scope! I rushed the idea to Mr. Ammar and he supported it in a heartbeat. The idea was to buy as much as we can from eclipse glasses and bring our telescopes and set them up in the our department’s building. Everything has to be done fast and thankfully with a little bit of daily visits to the management we were able to secure funds to buy those glasses, we bought 300 of them and we expected to have leftovers.
This was never done before, I was very excited about my idea, I contacted the PhotoClub and they promised to be there to capture the event with us, that day I met their president, Mr. Abdulaziz, he lead his club to greatness too.
The day came, we prepared those 300 eclipse glasses, with one telescope connected to a camera powered by RaspberryPi to live stream the sun. We also prepared some demos to explain the Physics behind such event, with some posters. Everything was ready, and everything was perfect.
That event was very successful, the whole department visited us, and we had way more people coming than we thought, the female students was part of it too. Here are some photos:
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The club then got a lot of attention, lots of people signed up and were contributing members by the end if that semester too.
Well, I feel like I digressed, I do not want to bore you with details, but I can assure you that my beliefs were way lower than they should be. I KNOW now that I am a great leader, the club never had such success ever. The club was an active part of the university’s community through collaborations with other clubs too. My circle of people expanded exponentially, I met lots of great colleagues and friends during this time, I was honored to be part of the Physics club.
Leadership is no simple business, I hate when Clubs are managed poorly, I cannot stand bad managers, their very existence irritates me. That’s why you may have seen me overreact to some brainrotted behaviors by some club managers, the amount of good they could do by stepping down is unbelievable.
People think being a leader of any sort is a flex. Well, yes, but actually no. The flex comes way later, after you establish yourself and earn the name ‘leader’. This is awarded to you by the people you lead. Some of you are just egotistic narcissistic maniacs who finds such position an opportunity to spew garbage. You have to be able to motivate people to work for you, to believe in your vision, this is the only way of great success.
I was honored to lead that group of people, it was truly a remarkable personality-shaping experience. Their dedication and their devotedness were truly unmatched.
Heroes of the Physics Club
Finally, here is our report:
Thanks for attending my tedtalk, see you soon for a very big rant about physics students…