Improved Skills

After hosting a very successful event, I have learned and developed several skills that directly apply to my future career. As someone who wants to become a high school social studies teacher, I am going to need a diverse skill set to bring to the table that sets me apart from others. I will be discussing the specific skills that I was able to work on and the habits of mind that were subconsciously being improved. 

The first skill I will be talking about is event management. Is this my first time hosting an event on campus? Actually, it is not. I helped host the National History Day (NHD) competition for the state of New Hampshire last April through an internship with my advisor. I oversaw registration and did several other tasks to aid my advisor in running the event. Despite having this experience, I still think it is so important to take a step back and get multiple perspectives from your peers when discussing how the event will run. Ironically, I did the same thing at the Sip ‘N’ Swap that I did at NHD, except it was much less stressful. Teachers help host events and volunteer all the time at their schools, and this is something that I cannot wait to do to give back to the community that I teach in. 

With all that being said, the habit of mind self-regulated learning directly applies to it. We were the ones in charge of everything, not our instructor. We made sure to have zero loose ends, not someone else. Reaching out to the Student Support Foundation was all on us. Thankfully, I have several ties to SSF and was able to create that partnership without problems, but it was still on us. Self-regulated learning goes hand in hand with project management, and I am more than happy that I was able to develop this skill and habit of mind even more. 

Another skill that I was able to work on was creating professional relationships to help promote our event. This would fall under the purposeful communication habit of mind and gave me and my group great practice for collaborating with other parties when it comes to events or anything else. Asking SSF to help us was easy, but they also wanted to benefit from the event too. So, our solution was to also collect canned goods for the PSU food pantry and to my surprise, they received a decent amount of donations. Coming to a compromise where both parties benefit from each other is a great example of how purposeful communication was used during our project.  

To conclude my thoughts, so many different skills have improved, and the ones mentioned are just the surface level. The outcome of our project brought us all great satisfaction not only because of the larger turnout than expected, but also because of the skills we all worked on together and improved at.