Learning Community Leadership Consortium Spring Kickoff
Recently, I attended the Learning Community Leadership Consortium, which is an event geared towards students that are in leadership positions within their learning community and students who are thinking of taking leadership roles in the coming years. When I had arrived, I expected to just hang around for a bit while members of the Learning Community Executive Council (LCEC) talked about the importance of leadership, how to be a leader, and what makes a leader. I was pleasantly surprised to find how interactive the event turned out to be.
After about 15 minutes of allowing the LC leaders and the prospective leaders to mingle and enjoy the snacks that were set up, we were told that we were going to partake in several activities. For the first activity, we were all given an index card that had a word on it, and were tasked with finding people with similar words on their index card. The card I received had the word ‘life jacket’ on it, and the person I was paired with had ‘sailboat’ on her card. Since we were a smaller group, we decided to sit with a group whose cards were ‘apples’, ‘oranges’, and ‘bananas’.
For the next activity, one person from each table was picked to be the team leader who went up to the LCEC representatives and was shown an image. That person was then given a plastic bag full of materials, including popsicle sticks, paper cups, several pieces of paper and masking tape, and was tasked with instructing the other group members on how to build a structure within ten minutes.
The first couple of minutes went smoothly, with our team leader telling us what to put where, and describing how it should look. However, in the middle of building the structure, our team leader noticed that there weren’t enough paper cups in our bag to finish building it. Other groups seemed to notice the distinct lack of cups, as many people rushed to where the snacks were being served prior to the start of the consortium and grabbed as many paper cups as they could. Since none of us had any used cups from earlier and everybody else already took all the cups, we instead decided to try to make our own paper cup out of the piece of white paper that came in our bag as it wasn’t necessary to create the final product.
When the allotted time came to an end, the LCEC members running the consortium opened up the floor to talk about our experiences with building the structure. One of the first things someone brought up was the fact that most of us had not received the necessary amount of materials in our bags, to which the LCEC member responded by asking us how we solved that problem. Many groups revealed that their solution was to steal the cups meant for hot chocolate, or use the cups that they drank their hot cocoa from earlier on as cups for their structures.
The trick of the task was subsequently revealed: we were all asked why we had just assumed that since none of us had enough that there wouldn't be enough if we all pooled our resources together. While one other group had offered to give us their leftover cups when they saw that we were trying to
make our own makeshift cup, we had declined not knowing that the point of the exercise was to have us go outside of our own team for help.
The takeaway was that just because you’re a leader doesn’t mean that you can’t ask for outside help; in fact doing so was highly encouraged. You’ll never know what kind of perspective someone will offer or how they’ll be able to help you if you don’t ask!
The event was an excellent opportunity to get a chance to talk to LCAs, FYE Mentors, Floor Mentors, RAs, and LC students that I would likely not get a chance to interact with at length otherwise. It’s a great opportunity to network and learn about what it’s like to be a leader in your LC! More information on LC leadership positions can be found here.
