This spring, UW-Eau Claire’s Activities, Involvement and Leadership office (AIL) is busy preparing for the latest iteration of their Leadership Seminar Series, which takes place from Feb. 25 until April 23.
Katy Rand, the Senior Coordinator of Student Leadership and Greek Life, facilitates and runs the seminar.
The series seeks to “Allow yourself to feel like you can explore leadership in a non-threatening, inviting way,” Rand said.
According to Rand, a significant part of the seminar is based on identifying a personal leadership strategy informed by historical perspectives on leadership and activities, which assist the participants in finding their own strengths and weaknesses.
“[The seminar] allows everybody to feel like they can be a leader from wherever they are and who they are,” Rand said.
Student leadership intern Addison Egnew, a second-year integrated strategic communications student, highlights the usefulness of these strength assessments and said she thinks about the skills that she identified in the seminar consistently.
Egnew also said that the skills she learned in the leadership seminar now help her in the internship. She and Aveline Bullert, a fellow intern and a third-year psychology and exercise science student, now run the seminars alongside Rand, in addition to facilitating other workshops around campus for a variety of groups.
Egnew and Bullert also participated in the Advanced Leadership Seminar. According to Rand, the seminar is a discussion-based deeper dive into leadership. The goal is to learn different versions of personal leadership to consider emulating in different scenarios.
“So[…]how do you receive or give feedback well, and how do you make sure you’re creating an inclusive environment. It’s like things like that. So it’s a little bit more vulnerable, but everyone has the same starting point,” Rand said.
Egnew, who took the two seminars concordantly in preparation for her internship, remembered the Advanced Leadership Seminar as covering similar leadership skills but “applying them in ways that we didn’t have time to with regular seminar.”
This vulnerability and conversation is certainly not absent from regular seminar, however. Bullert said that one activity in particular brought her group together. She described a session in which the participants stated something which they really were, such as an identity, and then followed that up with stating a stereotype of that identity which did not apply to them.
“We’ve had several from Greek Life who have participated over the past few years, but it’s been student athletes, it’s been music students, it’s been housing students, it’s been kind of a whole mix which is really cool,” Rand said.
The seminar features a “different theme or topic every week” Rand said. She said that the leaders try to allow participants to find the method for leadership that works for them. Egnew said that servant leadership was her personal preference.
“The servant leadership or like leading by example is definitely something that I think we focus on,” Egnew said.
Cora Lederer, a third-year organizational communications student, echoed this sentiment when she said that volunteering was the most impactful part of the seminar. Lederer said the seminar allows students to learn about specific areas and themselves through leadership ideas.
The seminar meets for 90 minutes each week for eight sessions, according to information on the Activities, Involvement, and Leadership office.
“We have a few more spots open for our Tuesday and Wednesday sessions, and we are always looking for some more,” Egnew said.
According to the AIL website, registration for the seminar is open through Feb. 21.
Crist can be reached at cristes9272@uwec.edu.
