Student Leadership Conference 2012

Saturday was UBC’s Student Leadership Conference (SLC) of 2012. (Unfortunately, I ended up missing Edcamp Delta because I realized that subtracting busing time between the two locations would have me at Edcamp Delta only for the lunch session and about half of one discussion session, so I didn’t think it would have been worth the commute.) In beginning this post, I suddenly realized how this could have been significantly less dull with pictures… …but I didn’t get any, so oh well. Hopefully the summary is useful to some of you! Please comment with your experiences at SLC 2012!

I actually started the day with what I thought was going to be a UBC Blog Squad breakfast at the Centre for Student Involvement (CSI). But when I got there, surprise! Hello Squad Leader, Peer Programs, etc. Bonanza! It was quite busy, and there wasn’t much food. I grabbed one juice box (what we were limited to) and a pancake (which there was a long line for), and then had to leave to register since my badge wasn’t at the CSI when I arrived (I was sponsored by AMS Club Executives instead of the UBC Blog Squad). Before leaving, though, I did see Jannicke, Rafaat, and Elba. Then Elba and I headed over to the Chan Theatre where we met up with Cass, Jenny, and Lu to get seats for the opening ceremonies.

Professor Stephen Toope and AMS President Jeremy McElroy both addressed the theatre (separately) before the opening keynote. I wasn’t really impressed by either of their speeches this time (as opposed to Imagine Day). Their speeches this time were shorter, but I was expecting something better from each of them. Next was keynote speaker Sarah Kay. I wasn’t impressed at the beginning of her address, but I thought it improved as it went on. She started with an introductory poem, though the only part I can really recall was a humorous interlude which I thought was a good way to break the ice with the audience. She mentioned how when she was young, the only computer in their house was her mom’s laptop. When her younger brother was 12, he downloaded his first porn… …onto the desktop of their mom’s laptop. After some discussion between their parents, they decided the best way to deal with the problem was this: creating a folder on the desktop labeled “[I can't remember his name]‘s Porn”. In the middle of her talk, she also performed her hands poem, which several people seemed to have recognized. And to conclude her talk, she performed a poem for her passed teacher/principal Mrs. Robero. I get into her poetry until her second poem, when I started to dissect some of the ideas hidden in her words. I didn’t really get into her poetry, however, until her last poem when I finally saw emotion shine through the poem. I think that was the biggest disappointment of her poetry for me, that she didn’t seem to put any emotion into her talk or poems until the very last poem; she was definitely expressive, but I didn’t feel anything until the end. This is probably why I didn’t stand when she got a standing ovation. Overall, though, I thought her address was very well structured and thought out. The flow was an excellent narrative and made sense as she moved through her main points. Two ideas I thought that really stood out in her address were “Never forget why you do what you do”, and “Be thankful for your mentors”.

If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.

–Sir Isaac Newton

After not being entirely impressed by last years Featured Presenters, I was tempted to skip out this year. Fortunately, I didn’t. I sat with Cait in on a presentation by Shobha Sharma, who is a director with Free the Children. I thought Sharma did an amazing job at empowering the students in the lecture hall. She did this by telling a story of how she, as an “ordinary student”, was able to play an active role in Free the Children, by the passion she displayed constantly in her address, and by engaging the audience in ways such as getting everyone to close their eyes and then standing up if they believe they can change the world by following their passions. I can only recall two things I didn’t like about her address. First, and this may seem a bit weird, but she was smiling widely the whole time. I know she said during her speech that the first thing you have to do in helping the world is to be strong yourself, but something about her constant smiling seemed fake to me, or at least it had me a little uncomfortable (eg. she continued to smile even after some of the depressing things she showed in some videos). Second, she showed quite a bit of video footage in her address. Although she was in the videos and the videos held powerful messages, I didn’t think they were of appropriate length for her address–I thought they were much too long. I signed up to hear Sharma in person–if I wanted to watch videos, I could have done so with my laptop from anywhere on campus. An interesting contrast I noted in the video was when she asked a bunch of Indian kids “What do you want to do in the future?” Whereas if you pose the same questions to North American kids, you’ll be bombarded with “A doctor! An artist! A firefighter!”, these kids were silent. It was like they either never put any thought into it, or they didn’t believe they had futures. This was a depressing cultural contrast, at least for me. However, what I also really liked about her address is that she had a blatant call to action. This is something about conferences, meetings, etc. I’ve been to lately, is that the delegates often enjoy their time at the event, but then assume that it ends there and do nothing. Sharma described that in her initial meeting with Craig Kielburger, he asked her “So what are you going to do about it?” From here, she did a call of action to everyone by reminding everyone that there is an immense list of things that are wrong with the world, but changing just one of those things makes the world a better place. She asked members of the audience what their passions were, and then encouraged everyone to use their passions, whatever they were, to make the world a better place.

Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

–Howard Thurman

For my first workshop, I joined Justin in his leading of a workshop called Meetings That Don’t Suck. He took several tips from the Harvard Business Review and a book called 5 Disfunctions of a Team. Some interesting tips I took away from the workshop include the following:

• The cost of having a meeting is not simply the duration of the meeting. The cost of having a meeting is the duration of that meeting multiplied by the number of attendees in the meeting.
• Things that shouldn’t take place in meetings include one-on-one or one-way things such as updates, or dealing with people who aren’t accomplishing what they were delegated. These are better dealt with in one-on-one conversations or through e-mails.
• If there’s no conflict, there’s no reason to call for a meeting.
• When e-mailing out an agenda before a meeting, the agenda should be included in the body of an e-mail, not as an attachment. Including it as an attachment makes it less attractive to the recipient to actually read.
• Meetings should have a designated chair, timer, note taker, and “yoda“. To explain the “yoda” (I think the other 3 roles are pretty self explanatory), the “yoda” is a person whose role is to ask important questions that often go un-asked, such as “Is this relevant?”, “Where does this fit into the topic at hand?”, etc. Because it is their designated role as “yoda” for the meeting, they shouldn’t be perceived as rude in their asking of such questions.
• An effective practice to engage everyone in a meeting during brain storming is to think-pair-share. That is, people brainstorm independently for a while, then discuss their ideas with a partner before bring each pairs ideas together in the meeting.

I was happy with the workshop overall. Clearly, it was no comprehensive guide to running a meeting (I wish there was one…), but it did provide some useful tips I’m interested in trying out!

During lunch, I was supposed to attend Goal Setting 101, but I figured I’m pretty proficient at that already, so I decided to talk to Khushi and Jessie instead. Eventually we made our way down to the Opportunities Fair where I saw Cass at the Toastmasters booth, Kshamta at the UBC Sustainability booth, and Ricky staffing for something I can’t recall. It was also the last time I saw Aaron in person before he disappeared from Vancouver for the next 7 months… Afterwards, I ended up talking (apparently I do this a lot. In case it wasn’t evident by the lengthy post…) to Kelvin, Patrick, Henry, and Leah for the rest of the lunch break.

After lunch, Leah and I headed over to check out Making Change From Here: Taking on the University and Winning, which was run by Matt, Sean, and Neal. The workshop gave a useful overview of how UBC governance operates, and how the Board of Governors, Senate, and AMS Executives are related. I think the tips will be quite useful for future endeavors ;D (even the more common sense things, such as providing statistics instead of simple stories). After the “lecture” portion of the workshop (which, I should mention since they won an award for it, was incredibly fluid between them. Without pauses, it seemed like they knew exactly when somebody else was going to take over speaking.), they broke us into groups (with Jeremy leading a fourth group) to explore what change we wanted to see at UBC. Obviously, I mentioned my usual; I’ll actually be meeting with Sean again soon to discuss it further. Anyhow, overall, I thought it was another great workshop.

Leah and I then headed over to the second session of featured presenters. We decided to check out Dr. Kishor Wasan, who was going to give a talk on neglected diseases. Although I did overall enjoy his talk, I thought that it seemed to be one giant advertisement for Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM). But anyhow, like Sharma, Wasan also did a great job at empowering the audience. He mentioned that students have more power than they often think, and have the ability to empower professors (which he tied into several examples involving UAEM). He also did a great job at illustrating that medicine isn’t isolated–to be effective, it has to be considered an interdisciplinary field since there are social, political, scientific, and economic things to be considered. As examples, he mentioned that keeping medicines viable during transport, avoiding counterfeit medicines, and escaping pirates were all obstacles to making medicines truly effective. He also mentioned the need for education. To back this up, he told a story of how a population was given insecticide-coated nets to cover their tents to help prevent transmission of parasites; unfortunately, this population instead used the nets to catch fish and as a result were poisoned by the insecticide that was transferred into the fish. Wasan further mentioned that it is not only neglected diseases that are a problem, but also neglected populations (such as the third world and aboriginals). Also like Sharma, Wasan again brought up the problems associated with India’s caste system. And in his question and answer period, at one point he brought up that a problem in the world today (with so many organizations competing against each other despite the same or similar goals) is the competition for funding and the duplication of work. One of the notes he ended on was that although there is no magic solution, that shouldn’t stop people from trying to help. He provided a list of organizations and collaborators worth looking into, such as the Accessible Science Initiative, for students interested in getting involved. Overall, I also thought Wasan’s talk was great.

Finally, the closing keynote: Neil Pasricha, author of The Book of Awesome. For this I sat with Miriam, Jenny, Cait, and Lu. Pasricha’s premise was that it is not the big, material things (eg. plasma TVs, cars, etc) that brighten people’s days, but the little things. To illustrate this, he had everyone write down on the back of a SLC business card-type thing something that makes them happy. He then had us exchange cards with someone we don’t know. I wrote “Herbal Tea” (I’m so happy I made this discovery. All it took before was 3 days of regular tea plus my missing one day for me to have a migraine. I don’t have that problem with herbal tea. Yay for no caffeine withdrawls!). The person whose card I received wrote “Having 2 life-long best friends who I can always rely on.” Anyhow, Pasricha seemed to like things that came in 3s. He had 3 A’s of Awesome: Attitude, Awareness, and Authenticity. He also had 3 S’s of work: Social, Structure, and Stimulation. He also showed some funny short videos to help motivate the audience. Although I did like his speech, I didn’t think it was worthy of the standing ovation it got (again, I didn’t stand). I didn’t think it was anything extraordinary, as I didn’t feel anything particularly strong from either the presentation or the ideas stemming from it.

All in all, I was quite pleased with the SLC this year. It definitely exceeded my expectations as there wasn’t any part of the day that I had a particularly negative experience with. I’m looking forward to SLC 2013!

How did you find the SLC? I hope you all liked it as much as I did

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