UHP Student Leader Roundtable was definitely a unique experience that helped me improve my club, College Mentors for Kids. I was able to meet with many different people representing a variety of unique clubs and organizations. Together we discussed recruitment, engagement, collaboration, building community, leadership transitions, and more. Learning about everyone’s unique experiences and varying perspectives was extremely beneficial to figuring out how to run my own club.

 

I receive several tips and tricks that have been working for other leaders, and I was even able to help out with my own ideas. I learned tricks for increasing engagement, such as having a points rewards system or giving away prizes. I also learned some interesting fundraising ideas, such as movie night or trivia night. I think I was able to help others by giving them information on how to set up a merchandise shop for their club and by explaining the leadership flow my club uses. Many organizations have been worried about the transition of leadership because current members haven’t been given the same experience as a normal year, so what my club does is we have normal members, lower staff, and executive staff that oversees the lower staff. This scaffolding allows for members to get trained towards each step of leadership, which makes it easier for more members to get leadership positions.

 

Overall, I think this experience has definitely opened my eyes to the reality of the college experience during this time. There is a unique sense of unity that wasn’t present in previous years, because we are all going through similar struggles even though we represent vastly different organizations. We are all trying to survive online school and online meetings as well as adapt our own responsibilities to fit the virtual world. This unique sense of unity allows us to understand each other more than before, which is an interesting thing to come out of the pandemic. We will always be remembered as the students and student leaders who managed to adapt to an online experience, something that has never been done before and may never be done again to this extent in our lifetimes.

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At the end of the experience, we created a culminating reflection and put it on a website in order to share. This website is available using this link:

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https://ucunivhonors.wixsite.com/leadershiproundtable

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