An intro to UNSW student society subcommittee applications & interviews

Posted on: February 9, 2023

Last Updated on: February 19th, 2023

Post Category: Student Experience

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A good way to get involved, build your skills, and make long-lasting connections, is by joining a student society.

Throughout my Uni experience, I sat interviews for various society subcommittee positions, and I got the opportunity to interview candidates for the UNSW Economics Society’s IT portfolio, back when I was a director in 2021.

Earlier this year, I wrote a post about interviews and how to prepare for them (you can read it here). In hindsight, the post was helpful for more typical job interviews, where you are the only person being interviewed by the panel.

Subcommittee interviews are a bit different…

So here are some of my insights regarding UNSW society subcommittee interviews. Feel free to navigate to whatever section you need:

• Intro to subcommittees
• Intro to subcommittee applications
• The typical structure of a subcommittee interview
• The types of questions you could be asked – and some brief tips on how to tackle them
• The group activity
• General tips

Intro to subcommittees

Student societies are responsible for providing opportunities to their members. These include opportunities to create bonds with other students, to connect with people from the industry, to keep up with the latest jobs/news, to learn a new skill, etc.

Behind every student society, there is a team that is responsible for organising these opportunities. These teams typically have different portfolios, and each portfolio organises some part of how the student society operates. Some common portfolios include Events (or Social), Marketing, Careers, Publications and Human Resources.

These teams generally have executives (including the president(s), vice presidents, treasurer, etc.), directors and subcommittee members. Executives manage directors. Directors manage a specific portfolio and their own group of subcommittee members.

Intro to subcommittee applications

Subcommittee applications typically open around the start of Term 1 every year, with a few opening up later in the year (during Term 3).

For most student societies, the subcommittee application process involves:

1. A written application, and
2. An interview

The written application stage is simple. During this stage, you will select the most-preferred portfolios you would like to join, and you will answer a couple of questions regarding your motivation and skills.

To ensure that you are invited for an interview, put sincere effort into your written application, proofread your responses – to correct any typos, punctuation and grammatical errors, etc. – and (try to) submit early.

The interview stage will be covered in the following section.

The typical structure of a subcommittee interview

For a normal interview, you have the following the structure:

1. The opening, where candidates are given a brief overview of the interview format.
2. Information gathering, where interviewers ask the questions.
3. The closing, where candidates are free to ask questions and are informed of the next steps.

From personal experience, a UNSW society subcommittee interview is much like a normal interview, except there is a pretty large emphasis on being able to work in a team – and on personality (i.e. how cool/fun you are to be around and to work with).

This is appropriate since there IS a large social aspect within student societies.

In saying that, the atmosphere of a subcommittee interview is a bit more relaxed, and there will usually be a group activity at the end of the interview.

The types of questions you could be asked – and some brief tips on how to tackle them

The main types of questions I’ve come across when doing interviews (as an interviewee AND interviewer) are shown below:

• Icebreaker questions
• Motivational questions
• Behavioural questions
• Situational questions
• Curveball questions

Below are explanations, and some examples, for each question type.

Icebreaker questions

Icebreaker questions give an opportunity for you to introduce yourself – and share a little bit of your personality.

They are fun, but they can easily throw you off when you don’t expect them. If it helps, you can come up with creative answers in preparation for some of the ones they may ask, but don’t be afraid to take some time to think about it, and keep your answers concise.

Here are some example icebreaker questions:

• Tell me about yourself.
• If you were a fruit, what would you be and why?
• If you were a brick in a brick wall, which brick would you be and why?
• Cereal before milk or milk before cereal?
• If you had to have one thing to eat for the rest of your life, what would it be and why?

Motivational questions

Motivational questions are used for interviewers to get a feel of your interest in the role.

Doing research into the society and the specific portfolios you applied for, and knowing how the role will help you reach your personal/professional development goals, will be helpful here.

Here are some example motivational questions:

• Why do you want to join our society?
• Why do you want to join the team(s) you applied for?
• What are some things you hope to (give and) gain from being a part of the team?

Behavioural questions

Behavioural questions are used for interviewers to get a feel of your skills and competencies.

These questions are based on this idea that past performance is a good predictor of future performance. So whenever you are asked a behavioural question, (typically) you would be expected to recall an experience, where you demonstrated a specific competency/skill.

Having a structured response is very important here. The STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) framework is a popular framework you can use to structure your responses.

Here are some example behavioural questions:

• Tell me about a time where you worked in a team (and explain how your contributions led to a successful outcome).
• Tell me about a time where you failed. Note: for this question, though you are not explicitly asked, you are expected to explain how you learnt from the failure to become better.
• Tell me about a time where you were criticised for a piece of work, and what you did do to improve your work (or the situation).

Situational questions

Situational questions are used to examine how you would react to situations you might come across when you are a subcommittee member.

Some of these situational questions will relate to the specific work carried out by the portfolio. But some of these situational questions will present more general teamwork-related scenarios. This is because teamwork is a fairly consistent requirement for all subcommittee roles, regardless of what society you apply to.

Here are some example situational questions:

• If collaboration is a key skill required for the role, you may be asked ‘Suppose you notice that another subcommittee member is being unresponsive. They are not contributing to their work and appear disengaged. What would you do in this situation?’
• If time management is a key skill required for the role, you may be asked ‘Suppose you have a tight deadline for tasks relating your subcommittee role, and you have many (other) commitments and deadlines to manage, what would you do in this situation?’
• If design is a key skill required for the role, which would be the case for portfolios like Marketing or Multimedia, you may be asked ‘Suppose your director was critical about the work you shared with them, and you are asked to make some significant changes. You already put a fair amount of consideration into the work you already shared. What would you do in this situation?’

Curveball questions

If the interviewers like to spice things up a bit, they might throw you a curveball question, though this is kind of rare.

Curveball questions are questions that are meant to make the interview feel more fun and casual, but they can throw you off when you do not see them coming. They are pretty similar to some of the icebreaker questions.

Because these questions aren’t serious, the interviewers do not expect you to have serious and structured answers to these questions. When you receive a curveball question, accept it as it comes, try to have fun with the question, and answer with whatever (non-inappropriate response) comes to mind first.

Here are some example curveball questions:

• How would you explain a mobile phone to a person in the 1800s?
• Who would you rather fight – 100 pigeon-sized elephants or 1 elephant-sized pigeon?
• Which state (in Australia) would you remove and why?
• How would you describe the colour yellow/purple to a blind person?
• What object would you be in this room and why?

Note: sometimes interviewers might ask follow-up questions, but answer them as they come and keep your answers short.

The group activity

Most subcommittee interviews will have a group activity component.

During a typical group activity, you will work with the other candidates on a case or hypothetical scenario, and you will have a couple of minutes to present your solution/ideas back to the panel.

Here are some example briefs you may get for a group activity:

• If you applied for Marketing, you may be asked to plan the marketing campaign of an upcoming (hypothetical) event.
• If you applied for Events (or Social), you may be asked to create and plan the logistics of a social event – open to all society members.
• Similarly, if you applied for Human Resources, you may be asked to create and plan the logistics of an internal bonding event – for the team members of the society.

General tips

• When societies are promoting their subcommittee recruitment drives (typically through Facebook), they will make a document (or, at least, some information) publicly accessible about the different portfolios. Treat this document as a collection of “job descriptions”, for all the different open roles they have. In this document, you will generally find information regarding required skills, desirable competencies, expected time commitment per week, etc. 

• What’s better (than just reading the document) is that you go to a director meet and greet and ask questions, so you can get a feel of the culture and learn more about the directors’ initiatives for the year. When you start a conversation with these directors, and you end up applying, your name may be recognised. This may give you a leg up in the written application stage.

• Practice with some standard interview questions. Lots of standard interview questions can be found online. And feel free to use the example questions I’ve written in this post when you practice.

• Avoid showing red flags in the interview. Straight after an interview, the directors will already have an idea of whether or not you are a good fit. Keep in mind that there are some things that candidates do that signal to the interviewers that they are NOT a good fit. Do not signal or communicate to the interviewer these things: you can not work in a team, you do not like working in a team, you are condescending, you are a poor communicator, you have many commitments and have little confidence in managing your time for the role. Later in this list, we will go through some of the things you can do to send positive signals to the recruiters.

• Show that you are passionate about the role – through your body language, expressions and the tone of your responses. As a minimum, smile, be kind and positive towards the panel and other candidates, and be willing to share and speak up (especially if you are an introvert).

• Portray yourself in a positive light when answering teamwork-related questions. Highlight your contributions whenever you talk about team experiences (i.e., what YOU did do to make the outcome of the team experience successful). And when you recall a team experience, especially a challenging one, never talk foul about other members you have worked with. Whenever you need to recall a challenging team experience, it is best to show that you remained positive, were resilient, and found and applied ways to remedy the situation.

• When you are working on the group activity, be a supportive and flexible team player. Candidates sometimes get competitive during the group activity. Candidates try to be dominant, they try to share the most ideas, and they believe that their ideas are the best way forward. Some candidates believe that, if they do this, they will stand out amongst the other candidates. Do NOT do those things. What you are doing is presenting yourself as a team member who is difficult to work with – and directors do NOT want that in their subcommittee. This is what you SHOULD be doing: contribute your ideas and suggest why you think they will work, encourage other members to share their ideas during discussion (especially the ones that are less vocal), actively listen to other members’ ideas (as they may be better than yours), ask the other members what idea(s) they prefer, and agree (as a team) the best way forward.

• Do not expect too much. Oftentimes, these societies receive a lot of subcommittee applications. So lower your expectations and treat the subcommittee application process – especially the interview stage – as a way for you to just get experience. By doing this, you stress less when preparing for and sitting your interview, and (ironically) this will help you perform better.

• Take a breather before you start, so that you are present, and go in with an open mind. Before you head into the interview, make sure you clear your head, don’t focus too TOO much on recalling your pre-planned responses, and expect to be met with questions that you weren’t prepared for. Prime yourself up and be ready to engage with the interviewers, and remember that you can always ask for time to think if you ever come across an unfamiliar question or have a mind blank.

• Have fun. Subcommittee interviews are (generally) meant to be casual, so treat it as such. Even if you are nervous or having a mind blank, admit it and laugh it off – the interviewers will understand.

• Try your best, and no matter the outcome, ask for feedback. For some students, perhaps even for most students, this is going to be their first interview. When you go into your very first interview, no matter how well/hard you prepare, you are going to bring in social tendencies that you use in your personal life. Some of these may be seen as positive while some are seen as negative. Sometimes, people can spend a lot of time preparing, but they end up not performing as well as they expected. This is normal when you are starting out. So do take the opportunity to reflect on your interview experience and, most importantly, ask for feedback – especially if you are not accepted. Directors are generally happy to provide feedback, but usually, they will only do so when you ask for it. To get feedback, ensure that you ask for it via email or a direct message to the interviewer(s).

And that was my little guide to UNSW student society subcommittee applications & interviews!

Here are some of my other posts on interviews and assessment centres:

• An Introductory Guide to Interviews – for Students
• NINE interview tips for Uni students
• My THREE GO-TO interview tips – in detail
• Learn about the Assessment Centre and how to succeed – with Tony Weightman
• Quick and practical preparation advice for interviews and assessment centres

You can also see more of my posts at jason-khu.com, follow me on LinkedIn, or see the rest of my ‘Uni for students’ guide here.