Week 3: February 3 (2 of 2)

Also during this week, the Hixson peer mentors took time out of the week to attend two conferences at the Iowa State University Memorial Union. On Friday, we attended the Learning Communities Mid-Year Institute; on Saturday, we attended the Iowa State Leadership Experience (or ISLE). Both were meant to expand our leadership skills and enhance the success of both the new Hixson scholars and ourselves.

My overall reaction of the learning communities institute was that it was well-organized and very informative and relevant to our work as peer mentors. I attended three workshops on Friday: one about four-year academic plans, one about highlighting a peer mentor experience in a resume, and one about using social media within learning communities.

Arriving at the Memorial Union bright and early (alright, it was 10AM), I attended my first session. It was hosted by the Kinesiology peer mentors, and was over how to handle four-year academic plans for freshman and transfer students. However, they also wanted to stress that peer mentors should not emphasize the term "four-year plan," because many students will extend their college experience because of the following: by adding a second major, a teaching endorsement, or a minor; by participating in student teaching, ROTC, or study abroad programs; or by needing extra course requirements, transfer credit issues, "last 32 credits" rule, and other delays. I thought it was very informative, but the peer mentors leading the discussion were also very Kinesiology-centered in their presentation (whereas we Hixson peer mentors will be handling many different majors in our recitation sections alone).

Next up was a presentation over highlighting a peer mentor experience in a resume, hosted by a representative of the College of Engineering student services office. I really paid attention to this workshop, because as a college student I feel like everyone has differing opinions on what a resume should look like and include and no one can seem to agree on the ideal format. Some of the tips I took away from the presentation include: be VERY specific and descriptive with your experiences, use action words instead of passive or vague/boring words in your descriptions, and keep your resume to one page but definitely consider including an objective. He also gave some interesting advice about interviews, including making sure to use the STAR (situation, tasks, actions, results) method when giving answers to behavior-type questions.

Lastly was a social media workshop hosted by the Women's Studies peer mentors. Just like with the Kinesiology presentation, I thought that this content was very good and informative, but their personal examples were not exactly transferrable to the Hixson Program because their learning community is all-female, whereas our freshman group will be co-educational. Nevertheless, we did learn about the various social media sources that are currently popular and how we can incorporate them into a learning community's curriculum. One interesting activity that we did at the end was a scenario (a learning community) that had the demographics of the group (such as "only 75 percent use Facebook) and other details; as groups, we had to determine what social media sources would be best to use so that the entire group would feel like they belong and could participate in discussions.

I attended one ISLE workshop on Saturday; it was over emotional intelligence and how that affects your students and you as a facilitator/coordinator. It was definitely interesting, because we never really think about how emotions or personal feelings will impact us when we're making decisions or giving advice to a large group. The presenter also gave a description of our generation as a general whole (some traits on this list on definitely spot-on!): interpersonal skills are less developed, strong computer skills, skeptical and desensitized, multi-tasking and distracted, high expectations of everyone, and negotiating everything.