Leadership Colloquium Testimonials
I attended the National Center for Student Leadership Conference this past weekend (April 3-6, 2014) in Arlington, VA. It was a 4 day event with students from all over the United States and some foreign countries. I met some awesome people and heard some great speakers!
Thursday started out with three keynote speeches, and then evolved into a networking-like event where we found a partner that we didn’t know and asked them three questions. This was a great icebreaker for the weekend. There were many of those throughout the weekend and the presenters and speakers did a great job of making sure that we made efforts to network outside of our comfort zones. On Friday and Saturday there were more keynote speeches and then breakout sessions. I attended the breakout sessions called: “Creating and Sustaining Productive Teams”, “Authentic Leadership: Check Your Leadership Ego”, “You Can’t Lead Others Until You Lead Yourself First”, “Conflict with Civility”, “Icebreaker Toolbox”, “Creating Your Positive Digital Identity”, and “Break on Through Team Builder”. The Break on Through Team Builder was the most personally impacting session, while the Conflict with Civility was the most professionally impacting session. I have notes from some of the sessions, and slideshows from the presenters from others.
Throughout the conference, all of the speakers and presenters were very accessible. Friday night we had dinner with one of the keynote speakers, James Robilotta, who was one of the best speakers I’ve ever heard and possibly the funniest person I’ve ever met. He is a professional speaker with a ResLife background, and he’d be awesome at RA training (HINT HINT).
Going into the conference, I expected there to be more RAs attending, however we were the only group of RAs that attended the conference together. SGAs were the most represented group, and there were many community colleges that attended as well. While not what I expected, I had an awesome time and learned a lot. I would recommend this conference to anyone in a leadership role, whether that be RAs, OLs, SGA, or club leadership. The lessons and speeches given were widely applicable to all leadership roles. I want to thank Reslife for providing me with the awesome opportunity.
Sarah Rogers, ’17