Fall Term 2012 Mission Complete

The term is about over and as customary I take time to reflect on the good, the bad and the... oops.

This term I set out to stabilize the program structure in the following ways:

1. Introduce as many first year students with our community as possible via targeted events.
2. Condense and deliver professional development curriculum for second year students.
3. Throw four high quality professional development events that integrated the goals of the two developmental levels.

What I have learned in each area this term:

1. The living community in the hall is going well, but it has a lot of opportunity still for improvement.
I had been hoping that placing four resident assistants in the hall would help transplant our "sub-culture" of placing school work above social time... and I guess we still have a lot of work to do. There are still not enough students engaged with our project to persuade the behavior of the masses. The resident assistants have mixed response to approaching the "community" as a unified team as they are torn between roles of "enforcer" and "mentor." I was also very concerned that the RA's overwhelmingly voiced added stress of balancing their own needs with the needs of the community.



2. The condensed curriculum for the second years students appears to have been a success. The pace of the seminar was adequate to accomplish our deliverable of profiles and basic digital portfolios. The addition of new members proved to be the perfect inspiration and motivation of returning students to step up their games. The events matched the development levels of the students and we had over 90% participation rate in every single seminar and event. Great success there!


3. The four event were executed flawlessly. We started with meet and greet with over 75 students and 20 faculty, administrators and core local community supporters in attendance. We executed a revised version of the Dean's Lecture with a real executive. This time, providing an intimate lunch with the returning seminar students, the lecture for all of the college to enjoy and the reception immediately following was a perfect balance of energy, contact and learning time for everyone involved. The skill-drill workshop used returning students to "coach" the new students how to shake hands and introduce themselves. We delivered quick instructions to the group and had small teams role playing- many of the students raved about how easy it was to learn such an intimidating skill. The next week we coordinated the networking event with the goal of students finding a professional to set an informational interview and feedback from both the professionals and the students came back overwhelmingly supportive.

What to do next?
Next term I will aim to execute two efficient skill building seminars. The goal of the first year seminar will be to identify natural leadership strengths and potential blind-sides. The goal of the second year seminar will be to articulate their profile characteristics in multi-media and "sticky" stories by the use of online portfolios.

The community building next term will center around the implementation of the new mentors and AKPsi role models.

The events next term will be with the purpose of teaching the students how to hold the "discovery" meeting with a new contact and we will attempt to teach them how to use a contact relationship manager- thank you procontact.me!

In summary, I will quote Lawrence Jackson. "when you know what you do well, just do more of it faster- you will pull away from your competition ten times as fast as trying to always fix your weaknesses"

Thank you Lawrence- mission accomplished.