Alpha Gamma Delta: The Final Chapter

Graduation is right around the corner and my time at Central is very quickly coming to an end.  With that means ending my time in the various organizations I have been involved with on campus throughout my 4 years.  This includes the one that has changed my life the most and the one that I will miss an incredible amount, Alpha Gamma Delta.  Reflecting on my time in the chapter is something that I have put off for months because I really cannot believe that it is coming to and end.

From Positional to Influential Leadership

Being Ritual Chair in the fall semester was a much different experience than it was in the spring semester of last year.  This time around I felt much less stressed and way more confident in my abilities to carry out the responsibilities of the position that I had been elected to.  Although there were challenges along the way, and I was working with a group of 27 girls instead of just one, I feel as if this was the best job I have ever done in a leadership position.  I was able to separate my personal life from the role I was serving for the chapter and made ritual, a part of Alpha Gamma Delta that most members hate, enjoyable.

Order of Omega

You know those organizations that some people get a lot out of but other don’t get much.. well thats exactly what Order of Omega is.  I’m sure if you asked every member of the club what they got out of their membership you would get completely different answers, especially when asking those who held a leadership position and those who didn’t.  Order of Omega is an organization for members of the Greek community that excel in both leadership and scholarship.  

Chemistry Lab Aide

During the spring semester of my senior year I was lucky enough to be chosen to work as a Laboratory Aide under the instruction of my favorite professor, Dr. Swanson.  My role is to attend pre-lab lecture and help the students understand the experiment that they would be conducting later in lab.  Then during lab I spent the majority of my time answering questions about the experiment, helping students stay focused and on track to finish in a timely manner and ensuring the lab would run smoothly by providing the students with the necessary materials like ice for ice baths, glassware and spectra for data analysis.  

Alternative Break: Animal Rescue

This year I wanted to try something new for community service. Going on an Alternative Break through CMU was something that I always wanted to do but it never lined up right with my schedule.  This year though I finally had the opportunity to sign up for a winter break.  I set my alarm for 7:00am and ranked all the breaks that were available.  When the morning came I was lucky enough to get a spot on the break that focused on Animal Rescue.  Throughout our numerous meetings, I was able to get to know the other participants on the break and the site leaders.  I also found out that we were going to Florida to volunteer at the Everglades Outpost.  

Hospital Volunteering

Over a year ago, I began volunteering at the hospital in Mount Pleasant.  I started working on the 3rd floor, helping out however I could.  I mostly stocked shelves and cleaned residents rooms but I was also able to learn about the care provided to patients based on their symptoms.  This year I had the opportunity to volunteer in the Emergency Department and in the Education Department.  Both taught me many different things and introduced me to different sides of the medical field.

In the Emergency Department I was able to watch procedures such as a Pneumothorax and the removal of a Bartholin gland cyst.  I also was able to witness a code red, which to most would not be an exciting thing, but I loved every minute of it.  I met a lot of great people who helped my further my education by allowing me to watch these procedures and explaining everything they were doing during them to me.  They also showed me how to read X-Rays and echocardiograms properly.

In the Education Department, I have the opportunity to work with they Nurse Educator at the hospital, who is in charge of keeping all the Nurses and Nurse Aides up to date on the always changing protocols in the hospital.  When volunteering with her, I am responsible for making quizzes and assignments for the Nurses and Aides to complete to prove that they still know what to do in different situation.  Some of the topics I have made assignments about are child abuse and neglect, intubation, and code reds.  I also had the opportunity to organize crash carts and the supply room for them.  This allowed me to learn about the uses for different medicines and tools used in an emergency.

I am so thankful for all the different opportunities volunteering at the hospital has presented me with.  I plan to continue volunteering there for as long as I can because I feel like the things I learn at the hospital are just as valuable as the things I learn in the classroom.

National Society of Leadership and Success

I decided this year to join another registered organization on campus to get more involved.  I was introduced to the National Society of Leadership and Success by my roommate.  She became apart of the organization last year and was able to take a leadership role within her first semester.  So I decided to join the organization and ended up taking the role of Community Service Chair.

When I agreed to take the position I talked to the old President about the responsibilities of the role. However, she was resigning and never told the new President that I would be taking the role.  Even though it was a small thing, this was a glimpse into how unorganized this group was.  The new President expected very different things from me than what I was told when I accepted the position.  Throughout the semester, it became more clear that this was the President’s first time in charge of an entire organization.

She tried her best to fix things in the organization and it was obvious to us all that she was very passionate about leading NSLS in the best way but she had one major downfall.  This is that she was not good at delegating at all.  She would take on the responsibilities of the positions of people she didn’t trust and wasn’t the best at communicating when she changed something.  This lead to unorganized chaos throughout the entire organization.  One of my friends who was also in the organization asked me a question about one of the events because I was on Eboard but I knew just as little as she did.

Overall, joining this organization was a major learning opportunity.  I saw first hand what it was like to have a leader who didn’t trust her followers and who was uncomfortable with having other people in charge.  It just goes to show how important delegating and communication is in an organization.

Ritual Coordinator: Alpha Gamma Delta

This year I took on two different positions in my sorority, Alpha Gamma Delta.  The first was as Activities Coordinator.  In this role I was responsible for planning paddle parties, practices for IM Sports, and keeping track of the number of activities each sister was involved in.  The position was pretty low-key but it gave me experience and insight as to how Alpha Gam was run.

I was elected to take the role of Ritual Coordinator this semester, which is a much bigger and more important position.  I am not allowed to say exactly what I do in my position but I am responsible for opening ritual during meetings, dry weeks and for planning the initiation of our new members. This proved to be the most difficult of all the tasks.  After getting elected, I started planning for the week, but it is one of those things that you have to wait until the week of to do the majority of the work.

My new sister Shelby, after she got initiated.

Initiation lasts a full week with events and ceremonies every night.  I was in charge of finding volunteers to fulfill the needed roles for each ceremony and for reminding our members about the values that we all strive to live by.  This week turned out to be one of the most stressful weeks of my life but it was one of the most rewarding things I have ever done.  Seeing the look on our new members face after getting initiated and how excited she was to become an official sister made everything worth it.

As with everything you do for the first time, there was a learning curve that went along with the week.  Of course I learned more about the timing of events and how to stay the most organized in order to keep things running smoothly.  More importantly however, I learned how to be someone dependable, how to be a good friend, that helping in anyway may not seem like a big deal but to the person you are helping it can mean the world.  I learned all these things from others because this is what they did to help me.  Having been in that position means I now know the best way to help others out during events, a quality that I believe is extremely important.

Leadership Launch: Round 2

For my LEAD Team this year I had the opportunity to volunteer with Special Olympics during the second annual Leadership Launch.  It is a program directed by the Special Olympics of Michigan and ran by student volunteers from Central Michigan University.  We invite high schools to send their students with disabilities and the students who help these children to come to Mount Pleasant for a day, where we educate them on how to be inclusive and how to promote inclusivity in their schools.

Each we my LEAD Team meet to have trainings and learn how to facilitate the different activities throughout the day.  This year, my team focused a large portion of our trainings on how to use inclusive language.  I am so happy we did this because it has changed the way I think and talk about others.  I learned to put the person before their disability like saying “the child who is deaf” instead of “the deaf child” and that very common sayings such as “Please raise for the playing of the National Anthem” are not considered inclusive language.  Since these trainings I have noticed how common it is for people, especially students, to use un-inclusive language.

Instead of leading a group of kids through all the activities during the day, I was chosen to facilitate on the the activities with another CMU student.  Our lesson throughout the day was that when we all come together we can make something bigger than ourselves.  We did this by having the students color in random puzzle pieces and then place them on the board.  At the beginning of the day, no one could figure out what the puzzle was making but as we collected more and more pieces the meaning became clear.

After the first couple groups we realized that the coordinates for the puzzle were wrong so it became an actual puzzle for us to do.  With the help of nearly everyone working on it during lunch and at breaks throughout the day we were able to get it finished and show the students what they had been working towards all day.  Two very important lessons can be learned from this; how important it is to work as a team and that sometimes things will not go as planned so being flexible and going with the flow is a crucial aspect when it comes to leadership.

Leadership Launch

This year I was fortunate enough to be apart of the Leadership Launch LEAD Team. A LEAD Team is basically a bunch of LAS scholars that join together to help plan, facilitate, or gather information from of for the Leadership Institute.  This year I had the opportunity to be apart of the 1st ever Leadership Launch team!
Put on in correlation with Special Olympics Michigan, Leadership Launch is a program that invites high school students and their special needs peers that are enrolled in the program Project Unify in their school (Learn more about Project Unify here: http://www.specialolympics.org/projectunify.aspx.) Together we explored more ways to produce an inclusive environment in each of the high schools in every aspect, not just sports.