For nearly a year, Alex has volunteered as an SFU OLC Social Media Content Curator through the Student Ambassador Program.  This position requires the volunteer to draft social media content for SFU OLC social media channels, which requires researching different articles to promote online.  We interviewed Alex to see what he learned from the position so far.     

What are you currently studying at SFU?

I am currently studying computer science. In other words, I look at code and stare at it for hours.

How did you hear about volunteering as a social media curator and what interested you about it?

I heard about it after I saw an advertisement for the Student Ambassador Program. I looked through some positions and found the social media curator position. What interested me was that it was a position that helps others become more aware of what is going on in the community and also helps co-op seeking students to find jobs all through social media. Because I wanted to give back to the community and was also going to be seeking a co-op term, I signed up.

What do you like most about this position?

What I like the most about this position is that I get to help a whole lot more people than the traditional presentation or print media. The flexible hours are also a big plus because it made the position accommodating for school life. When I say school life, I mean midterms and finals. 

What are some challenges you have come across in this role? (How did you overcome them)

The challenge I came across was that there might be a lack of good, relevant articles that would help a co-op student. Sometimes I would find someone promoted the OLC stories I wanted to do first or the site I would go to would not have anything of worth at the time. Besides waiting for more new OLC articles, I would search for new sites where I would find articles that fit the bill. If the site had enough interesting articles, I would make a mental note of it and come back later for more articles. cough-US News-cough. Anyone can do this and it takes little effort to narrow your search results from Google to what you want. 

What have you learned from volunteering for the OLC?

I learned a whole bunch of stuff but I'll narrow it to three. One of them is that I learned to speed read faster so I can get through a lot of articles quickly and decide which ones I would send or not. Another is that I learned a whole lot more about co-op and effective interview skills from reading the OLC articles and job seeking tips I found for the SFU co-op Twitter. Finally, I learned how to condense a whole article into 140 characters or less. It can be surprisingly hard to do when an article talks about a whole bunch of things and you don't want to take up two tweets to promote it.