Dear Auntie J: Stay or quit?

Hello sweeties!

Auntie J here checking in after a much-needed week off. Whether you went to Bali or Boston, Trinidad or Trenton, or just vegetated on your Ikea futon for a week, I hope you got the rest you lovely people deserve. We dive straight back in this week, and with the restart of classes comes the restart of all the other time-suckers we have in our lives: relationships, friends, and our “favorite” drain on our time, extracurriculars!

Someone this week has asked:

Dear Auntie J,

I joined an extracurricular group in my freshmen fall because of interest, and by now I have a leadership position in the group, but have found the work increasingly tedious — I’ve lost most of my passion about this activity at least in this particular group, because I worked hard to get this position and don't want to give it up easily, especially since I don't have much else on my resume and this experience would hopefully be helpful if I want to work in a relevant industry in the future, which is a possibility I've always considered. Shall I stay or quit?

Ah, the classic resume-padder. As much as we pretend that we are one hundred and ten percent committed to every activity to which we devote time, in reality we recognize our time is short and demands are many, so joining career-orientated clubs is not necessarily the worst idea of them all (Auntie was considering joining TCM until she found out that it did not, in fact, assist in learning about traditional Chinese medicine, but instead purports some kind of abhorrent, novel practice known as “investment banking”). If this is something you are strongly considering after graduation, then there must be something motivating you to tread that path. My first piece of advice would be to consider why you joined the club in the first place, and why you had not decided to drop it earlier on. If you worked so hard to build yourself up to where you are, what drove you to expend so much energy?

Once you have worked that out, my advice is exceedingly simple. You have this wonderful opportunity now to have a say in how the group is run, and to change it in ways you see fit. Although I’m certainly not suggesting you run around like you own the place and anyone else’s opinion is invalid, there must be something you can do to inject some passion into the project! I’d have a chat with other people in the group and see if there are any ideas floating around as to how to make the group even better. If you were interested before but your interest is starting to wane now, it might be a common feeling amongst all your teammates. Then again, if your interest has waned and there’s nothing you can do to change that, it might be time to call it a day.

If you want to see your question up here in the coming weeks, you know the drill: Head on over to bit.ly/askauntiej, pop in your question and the lovely “Street” fairies will send it straight on (anonymously) to Auntie!