Walk Into the Future

Tag: Student Success

  • Five Minute Thursday: 51st Student Leadership Conference

    “Learn from yesterday.  Live for today.  Hope for tomorrow.”.

    (Albert Einstein)original_46c05165-dbd9-4075-aff6-9174019f7efe_20241004_103953

    The Five-Minute Thursday writing prompt is back for another run.  My friend Maria likes the concise nature of this writing prompt, so I decided to bring it back. 😊

    I take pride in my Authentic Leadership work and share with anyone who will sit down to listen to me.  I have worked with the Indian River State College Student Government Association (SGA) over the past four years.  My work with these students centers on student development and leadership.  The students are eager to learn, and this inspires me to work with them more.

    My fifth prompt for Five Minute Thursday is: The 51st Student Leadership Conference.

    I was approached by the organizers of the leadership conference to help students with their professional journey.  The theme for this year was: Perseverance Towards Excellence.  The intent was to provide students with foundational information to help them develop skills to move them forward.  I have presented leadership workshops with these students in the past, but the organizers asked me to focus on life after graduation, the world of work.

    I decided to focus on The First 90 Days on the Job for my presentation.  I’ve had this content in my professional speaking library and modernized the content for this conference. 

    Most of the students know me from around campus and I was surprised with the number of students that attended my session.  The students identified learning how to become professionals was an important skill they wanted to learn so that’s why they picked my session.

    Areas we covered during the session:

    • Understand Organizational Culture
      • Communication modes and formalities
      • Dress and appearance expectations
      • Work hours
    • Positive Work Behavior
      • Review employee handbook
      • Maintain professional demeanor (happy hours, social events)
      • Ready to learn and strong work ethic
    • Build Effective Relationships
      • Find a mentor
      • Align with positive colleagues
      • Create goals

    The students were receptive to these points and seemed eager to put these in play.  I’m always excited to help students develop as young adults.  This session will help them as they enter the world of work.

    What points would you share with our students?

    Irie!

  • Student Success Karaoke

    Student Success 3

    (Prince, Luke Combs and Gwen Stefani)

    “If work isn’t fun, you’re not playing on the right team”.

    (Frank Sonnenberg)

    Work hard and play hard.

    How many times have you heard this phrase?  Do you agree or disagree?

    Well, my Walk into the Future journey provides a perfect dichotomy to both sides of this concept. I continue to seek adventures that allow me to maximize my personal time when I’m not trying to change the world one tree branch at a time.

    My work as Associate Vice President of Advising and Career Services allows me to impact a lot of people in positive ways.  There are days where I’m not the most popular person in the building based on decisions I must make as part of my daily duties.  This is a part of the business and makes my work interesting.  No two days are the same.

    I leverage my Organizational Psychology knowledge to build a team environment and culture to help the team thrive daily.  We have built in team building activities with cohorts to help our communication and ability to get positive results for our clients.  We started using the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) to enhance our internal communications and build on our goal towards positivity within the workplace.  The process to improve culture is an ongoing project and one I put a lot of effort into for continuous improvements.

    We started hosting a large Student Success activity during Halloween week back in 2021.  That year we put on an 80’s Dance Battle between one of my friends and myself.  It started as a simple joke, but the staff heard us talking and decided seeing older guys battle dance at work would be fun.  We turned this event into a full fledged 80’s party where staff dress in 80’s gear and we played music from the decade.  Fast forward and this was successful and we entertained colleagues from around campus.  Never saw so many smiles, people laughing and having fun at work. 

    Student Success decided to run this idea back for 2022.  We graduated to the 90’s with Music Bingo and a modified dance battle.  The intent was to engage folks in a different manner and still have music in the process.  We drafted dance teams and then had them battle in front of their colleagues to pick a winning team.  Our President got involved and handed out prizes to the winning team—we didn’t know he was going to do this.  Again, we created and hosted another fun and successful event that got the campus vibing and enjoying time with colleagues.

    My VP texted me over the 2022 Thanksgiving break with an idea for the 2023 fun activity.  Yes, we started planning the next event a full year in advance. 😊

    Her concept was to host a karaoke event and encourage staff to dress as their favorite artist.  This sounded good to me but did not fully process how this would work format wise, but we had a full year to bounce ideas and put the program together.

    Turns out Student Success Karaoke has been our most creative, ambitious, and entertaining event so far!  Did not realize how many folks enjoy karaoke and the ability to dress up at work.  We added a few wrinkles to the format where participants had to dress as their favorite artist and had to sing a song by that artist. 

    We had performances by Prince, Luke Combs, Steppenwolf, Billy Joel, Garth Brooks, Sia, Lil Nas X, Radiohead, Salt n Peppa, Gwen Stefani and Run DMC to name a few.  Everyone was dressed appropriately and had fun while entertaining the crowd.  This was my first-time singing Karaoke, and I was completely sober—no alcohol in sight! LOL. We had folks from every office on-campus in attendance and they all signed up to sing.  Some even hit the stage multiple times to show us how talented they were.

    We had three local food trucks pull up outside our building and provided folks with multiple lunch options in between our song sets. 

    Another successful event for the Student Success team!  This process may seem simple, but it goes a long way towards building the team dynamics that will allow us to grow and thrive together.

    Yes, folks are already asking us what we have planned for next year.  No idea at this point but it will be epic—I promise! 😊

    What do you do for teambuilding?

    Irie!

    “Where people aren’t having fun, they seldom produce good work”.

    (David Ogilvy)