In the beginning of every quarter, Sloans will elect various class officers. For these Sloans who are willing to sacrifice their study hours and step up for the greater good of the class, the below analysis might be helpful in their consideration. If I could make a 3D chart I would add one more dimension for the variance, but we'll start with a simple one for now.
Confession of a Stanford Sloan Fellow Series EP05
Treasury
Usually collect money from Sloans (not the other one) ... hard to amuse people with that ... have to deal with a lot of cash-settlements ... just like in a typical CFO job, if you do well, people take it for granted without understanding what a challenging effort the job entails; if you don't do well, people keep whining about it.
Academic
Liaison between Sloans and teaching faculties ... collect feedback and provide feedback to faculties ... not an easy job to walk that balance and gain goodwill from both sides ... the perceived correlation between efforts & results is not as obvious as in other officers' jobs ... haven't run into any academic crisis yet so let's see how this one goes.
Web
Hard work as people always have a million IT issues ... people's expectation on response time makes the job even more challenging ... clear perceived correlation between efforts and outcome so their hard work does bring substantial goodwill
Social
Tremendous amount of work ... very hard to balance needs from the entire class with such diverse backgrounds and opinions ... execution could be a significant challenge because of the large number of people involved in those events ... luckily people do appreciate the efforts (regardless of how good the actual outcome is) , not to mention those efforts are very visible, so it still can be a very rewarding experience.
President
(Almost like the Speaker of the House) as the agenda setter for the class has considerable power to influence the effectiveness/collaboration among the chairs and between students and staff; not an easy job though as its deliverables are not as clearly-defined as those for other officers.
Yearbook
Hardest of all ... because the monster effort only kicks in at the end of the 12-month Sloan period as people are moving on to other ventures and priorities ... almost feel like the last one to turn off the light ... but no doubt people's happiness level will be raised substantially when the yearbook comes off the printer.
In terms of variances or risks, I think Social, President and Yearbook have bigger potential swings (it's either love or hate from the critical and opinionated Sloans) ... and Web, Treasury, and Academic probably have narrower confidence intervals.