Identifying Student Leaders

Hours: 8:00am - 12:00pm

Revised student work schedule and brought it to Brenda in Residence life. Created an Agenda for Tuesday meeting with the Volunteer & Service-learning Center and orientation to plan and design the division of responsibility for the Orientation Day of Service. Ray Lorigo stopped by with a student, and I listened in on how the advisement process works in conjunction with orientation; the order of things, and how to answer questions when students say, "do i have to go to orientation?" and "i just want to do what i have to do to get this degree as quick as possible" . Also, I identified a student that is and has been extremely active on the Class of 2013 facebook group in answer new student questions with accurate information. I sent her a facebook message and asked her to be an "Honorary Assistant Orientation Leader" to recognize her early initiative as a student leader. Also worked on some assessment stuff applicable to both the VSLC and orientation: mostly related to how to Sum categorical data in a useful way. Above is my graph from SPSS summarizing our Community Partner Survey Data from Spring 2006 - Spring 2008 about How interactions with BSC have influenced the organization.

Reaching out to the student on facebook was an initiative I borrowed from Kevin Prentiss at SwiftKick. They address head on a lot of the questions about how to incorporate social media into college life, since it's a natural extension. I'm really happy that Bob gave me the go ahead..some people take strong stances either for or against using social media, but it's nice to figure out where some boundaries are, and have a supervisor that is open to using the technology to our advantage instead of being afraid of it.

It's not only important to identify student leaders, but also to connect them with campus. I hope that we have offered that to the new student who's basically doing a good part of our job in the Class of 2013 facebook group. She should be recognized for her efforts, and rewarded. I took a chance on the advice about monitoring the incoming class's FB group to find out what the students are talking about and who the leaders are, and i hope that it pays off and S. feels connected to campus. we'll see.