The UHP Student Leader Round Table is a new honors experience that was created in the Fall 2020 in response to the unprecedented times of virtual events and lectures in the UC community and beyond. The purpose of this experience is to provide a space for UHP leaders across all disciplines to collaborate and learn from each other as they adapt to assuming leadership positions in the new virtual space.
The group met once every two weeks during two meeting options. I attended Friday mornings where there were usually about 10 or so other people each time. Typical meetings consisted of 30 minute breakout sessions discussing one of two topics voted on by participants for that week's meeting and then 30 minutes where everyone came back together to discuss what was brought up during breakout sessions and final thoughts.
Below are some of the meeting topics:
- Engagement-Goals
- Hosting Events and Meetings
- Inter-Organizational Collaboration
- Recruitment
- Developing Mentors and Leaders
- Motivation and Morale
- Engagement and Communication
Overall, membership engagement/recruitment and leadership development were the two main topics that were brought up most if not every week.
As a final showcase for this experience, we created a website that included blog posts with why we joined and what we learned from the experience. I ended up writing a lot on my blog post (I should be under the Friday Friends tab), but there are a couple of thoughts I didn't include on the blog that I wanted to put here:
- I heard from and talked with people from a wide variety of groups (in terms of size, age of organization, and focus/purpose). It was interesting hearing about how different groups operate. There were definitely some universal takeaways in terms of leadership and running a group that are applicable across all groups and others that were more organization-specific.
- The shift to virtual has caused many groups to adjust how they recruit and engage members. One surprise to me was that movie viewings online were not very popular. There were also issues with finding platforms that allowed quality video sharing.
- As a person who has just assumed a leadership position on campus this semester (more on that in the blog post), I highly recommend finding some way to be involved at a higher level within the organization whether that be volunteering to take the lead for some smaller projects within a group or applying for a leadership position. I have learned a lot in my executive role position in terms of running an organization and working with others that I think will be a valuable skillset in the future.
- Finally, I think the Student Round Table was a valuable opportunity for Honor students to talk with other people who also are involved in leadership positions on campus to discuss what works or doesn't work for other groups. I took away a couple of pretty decent nuggets that I would like to implement within my own organization in the next year and a half (or at least set the groundwork for future leaders) and can use in the workforce. With the shift to virtual, I think this experience put us on more equal footing because a lot of the topics were how to run an organization in the new environment which that everyone was learning to adjust to, but I think even when we are back to in person events, this could be a valuable experience for Honor students to learn about and be indirectly exposed to how other organizations on campus are run because there seemed to definitely be differences in small vs big, established vs newer, and more advisor-run vs student-run organizations.
Below is the link to the website that was created with participants' reflections and takeaways from the group this semester: