Post pajama jammy jam

Hello friends!

My day started with a wake up text from Nick at 6:30am...and I was not a happy camper. Regardless, I woke up and got ready for a day full of educational sessions. At 7:30 me and Nick walked to Dunkin Donuts and enjoyed a gourmet breakfast of toasted bagels and coffee, the true breakfast of a college student. After breakfast we headed back to the hotel to set off to our sessions.

The day was kicked off with keynote speaker David Stollman. Dave as an amazing speaker and I'm so happy that I was able to attend his presentation. We learned about how you "earn" your letters when you're allowed to wear them, not by the things you are forced to do before you get them. We also learned that having "socials" is a benefit, not what your organizations value is. Dave taught us a lot of great ways to look at our community and see how we can better it. We also covered the stereo types of fraternity and sorority members and how we can change that image by representing our organization both in and out of our letters. All in all it was a very beneficial presentation.

After keynote was done we were broken up to head to group sessions. In our group sessions we had an open discussion where we were told to reflect on "what the reality of our organization is?" "where do we want our organization to be?" and "what is standing in the way?". This was a really interesting session because we realized that a lot of people there had the same issues with in their chapter. I got a lot of new ideas and insight on the struggles our community faces.

After group sessions we all met up for lunch and discussed what we learned in our groups.

Next, I headed to a session called "Flip your organization". This session teaches you how to positively change the way things are don in your chapter. We learned the keys to motivation members and how to efficiently communicate with each other. We learned about morale and that it is important to make sure you are living up to your organizations mission statement. We also covered the 10 commandments of motivation. Susan Zarnowski and she did an amazing presentation. She is a graduate student at UNH and will hopefully be coming to BSU to do a presentation for our community!

The next session I went to was PhiredUp Dynamic recruitment. This was such an amazing presentation and I strongly encourage everyone to check out phiredup.com This was a workshop to learn the most effective ways to recruit woman. The speaker for this session was Jessica Gendron Williams. If you follow me on twitter (arwood17) then you will see all of my tweets about the session. The most important thing that i took away from this session is that "people join people" and "quality drives quantity". We learned how to build relationships, 5 ways to meet new girls, and the 5 for 5 challenge!

The last session I attended was the Values Based Marketing. The speaker for this session was Jesse McPherrin from Lehigh University. We learned that when marketing your organization it is important to market your values. People should be joining your organization because they agree with your values which is why it is important not to market false advertisement. We learned about having a brand for your organization and that there are 3 steps to develop your organizations brand. We also covered some effective ways to market our organization.

Finally all of us BSU greeks headed to the Black Bear Saloon for dinner. We enjoyed a nice meal, courtesy of BSU. After dinner me and Erin attended an event that had games and mingling. But finally we headed to the pajama jammy party with all the bears and mb. We played catch phrase, which we are all awful at aside from Matt.

Today was a great day and now I am ready to get some sleep so I'm all rested up for another great day tomorrow.

Goodnight bears!
Amanda