Scream USC began with four core leadership roles: President, Secretary, Director of Marketing, and Director of Events. This functional structure mirrored traditional professional teams, where each member specializes in a role and contributes that expertise across all initiatives. Our executive board collaborated on every event, with each person fulfilling responsibilities defined by their position.

However, we quickly outgrew this model. What I didn’t anticipate was that functional structures rely on a level of ongoing collaboration that’s difficult to sustain among college students volunteering only a few hours each week. Because event planning was centralized, I unintentionally retained ownership over nearly every initiative. The result was a system that felt neither productive nor personally rewarding for anyone involved.

At the end of our first semester, I proposed a new structure alongside an expansion of the executive board. The revised model introduced seven roles and a hybrid approach: it preserved centralized leadership for certain cross-cutting areas (President and Director of Marketing) while shifting the remaining positions toward a divisional structure. Each of the following roles took full ownership over a category of events:

• Director of Events: park trips and other outings
• Director of Membership: general meetings and on-campus member engagement
• Director of Industry: guest speaker events and professional outreach
• Directors of Project Oversight: large-scale, headlining initiatives of their own proposal

This shift made delegation far more natural and significantly improved the leadership experience. In anonymous feedback, the percentage of executive board members who selected “Strongly agree” for the prompt “I have enjoyed my experience on the Scream USC E-board.” increased from 25% to 100%. Many also shared anecdotally that Scream USC was the most meaningful leadership experience of their college career.