The Student Leadership Council, as an entity, generally becomes more active over the life of its center and plays an important role in representing students and solving their problems. Its focus, which was initially to establish itself as a student representative body, evolves to operate more effectively and to live up to the expectations that students have of it. The number of students in a center can continuously increase over the years, usually from a handful at inception to over 100 at maturity; therefore, the importance of the SLC grows accordingly. In many cases, the SLC meetings that used to be held once a month have now become a weekly event. In the process, the SLC emerges as more dynamic and more actively involved in the student body.

Although the primary responsibility of an SLC is to attend to the basic requirements of the students, it does not need to restrict itself just to this. Various activities are arranged from time to time, including outreach and social events. These activities not only entertain the students but also benefit other people who are not part of the center. Social activities such as Students' Day, barbeques, potlucks, etc., along with outreach activities such as peer review, LEGO competitions, etc., have become part of the tradition of most SLCs. Various committees are established periodically by or within the SLC to address specific interests. For example, the industry committee at one of the centers organizes LIFE (Learn Industry from the Experts) courses for students and has individual student liaisons for each industry partner. Similarly, the poster committee at many centers assists students in displaying their accomplishments in poster format while public relations or social committees are responsible for planning social events and maintaining external communications.

SLCs have been generally successful in fulfilling their responsibilities. But along the way there have been certain initiatives that were not as successful as they were expected to be. One example was the creation of a CD-ROM as a resource containing information for high school guidance counselors. It was intended to help prospective students and freshmen who were trying to decide on a major, but ended up costing far too much money and time. Another SLC attempted to arrange a bioengineering-specific job fair with industrial partners. However, during the planning it was determined that the frequency of job openings was insufficient to warrant an entire job fair and it was decided that, instead, information regarding job opportunities could be effectively communicated through student liaisons, the education director, and personal networking.

SLCs are doing an outstanding job, overall. However, the SLC survey indicated there are still some areas that need improvement. One issue that was identified is the need for more student involvement in outreach activities. Another is the organization of outdoor/recreational activities such as hiking, soccer, and volleyball games. The SLCs also need to formulate strategies to motivate new students to get involved with the SLC functions and leadership as soon as they join the center. To improve the attendance at SLC meetings, it would be good to invite new and inactive members to come and speak, hence getting them more involved.

Through this study, we have attempted to ascertain the "best practices" of SLCs from as many centers as possible. Though we naturally hoped to be able to hear from all the centers in the ERC Program, we were nevertheless gratified by the amount of information obtained from the 11 centers that did respond. We believe we have put together a comprehensive document that summarizes the important activities of SLCs and identifies "best practices" in several key areas.

We hope that this study will benefit not only new centers, where nascent SLCs will be able to learn from our findings, but also give mature SLCs an opportunity to borrow ideas that have been tried and successfully tested elsewhere. We hope that this study will be an ongoing process, with new findings being periodically added to what we trust will be a living document.

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