Not counting the senior week graduation edition of the Dickinsonian, this week marks the penultimate issue of Volume 145 of our student-run newspaper. A.k.a., just one week for everyone to get in those heated (but concise) letters to the editor! Our editorial board elections are coming up this weekend to choose the paper’s new leading staff for the 2012-2013 school year—stay tuned and check that grad issue to find out the results. Planning elections for the paper’s editorial board sure was a reality check and major reminder of the “cycling through” nature of student organizations, where club leadership must change essentially every year to accommodate the changing student body.

I know the paper is not alone in the natural progression of leadership evolution that occurs with student-organizations. Change at Dickinson is evident, with the Blue and Grey Hat tappings last weekend, Senate elections two weeks ago and MOB Executive Board elections in the last week as well.

Through anecdotal and personal experience, I can admit that this transience of student leadership has been a constant source of stress and tension for many organizations. For the most part, the source of problems with identifying key leadership goes like this: the seniors are all graduating, the sophomores are probably going abroad, the juniors are returning to campus after a year of being abroad and the freshmen are the only ones who will be there next year who were here this year, but they probably have no idea what’s going on. This leaves a fun jigsaw puzzle of deciding who gets a promotion.

While the way this is set up can cause much consternation on behalf of current leadership in trying to figure out who to promote, I think it’s important not to get too caught up in planning the line of succession and trying to micromanage the future of an organization so everything will be “streamlined” and “run smoothly” next year. Seniors, I also think it is worth saying that you are graduating. Time to move on and let others pick up the reins. You’ll always have Carlisle and those times with your organization, but the “broader world” is beckoning.

The whole point of student organizations is that they are as the name suggests, student-run. With many student leaders, it probably takes a third to half of the year to figure out what the heck they are doing and how they even got there (I’m still working on this part). It is in this time of figuring out how to make the club run that the personal development and real fun occurs.

For instance, even if I were to write a 500-page manual on the inner-workings of the Dickinsonian and explore every possible situation I could think of and how to deal with them for the sake of preparing the next editor, the manual would not be able to ensure smooth operations for next year. For one, no one wants to read 500 pages about the banalities of subscriptions, computer software and finding stories anyway. But more importantly, while it is healthy to prepare for the future, realistically, so many variables will pop up that we could not have predicted anyway, making over-planning a royal waste of time.

I would advise any seniors freaking out about not having sure-fire plans for next year to think about this as well. It’s great to have a grand strategy in mind, and this probably works out better for people who want to go straight into professional schools to practice law, medicine, dentistry, etc., but for everyone else out there without a 500-page life manual, I hope your experience at Dickinson and times working on these student organizations has taught you that flexibility, adaptability and open-mindedness are key.