2012-03-04 My Long Overdue Student Leadership Conference 2012 Recap

Here's my long overdue post the SLC 2012 I attended this January. Now with that said, I still didn't get my money back for my free registration. Can't say I'm having a best impression of them so far. Anyhow the conference itself succeeded my expectation in their choice of guest speakers but overall I feel it's just as useless as all the other leadership conferences. At least to me. These conferences and workshops never seem to work on me in teaching me things or inspiring me.

Okay recap.
The conference started at 9AM and registration started at 8:00AM. Got there at 8:45PM because I slept really late the night before and woke up late. But still made it in time and there was a whole lot of people in the Chan Center. It was super crowded and hot. I was really lucky to meet a friend randomly as we were getting seated for the opening ceremony. Found a buddy. yay :)

The start of opening ceremony was really blurry to me. Nothing impressive happened. Just some speeches from Professor Stephen Toope and AMS President Jeremy McElroy. They also showed some SLC videos. The theme this year was "Breakthrough" and in unity with Neil Pascricha (the closing ceremony keynote speaker)'s Book of Awesome, SLC made all these posters and videos of somethings people thought were awesome about UBC. Honestly, that month, SLC made me hated the word "awesome". And some of the things said on the posters wasn't even so-called "awesome"...like "trees..awesome"...=___=

The highlight of the ceremony was definitely Sarah Kay, the opening ceremony keynote speaker. She is a spoken poet. At first I wasn't expecting much because 1) I don't understand poetry 2) I don't understand poetry, written or spoken. She started her speech with a story about her in the countryside for summers. I thought it was a story with a really abrupt ending...but it turned out to be a poem. For that moment, I was impressed in the way she delivered poetry and that I understood the poem! She performed it like theatre and, later on, I learned spoken word poetry is about combining poetry with theatrical performances. I enjoyed all her poems because her performances are captivating and easy to understand. Here's the first poem she performed:


I have to say her pace and expression was much better in the actual performance than this old video. But one thing I am still fuzzy about is the point behind her poems. I'm taking her poems very literally so I feel I am not appreciating her poems on a deeper level...if there is one.

Based on the theme of breakthrough, Sarah talked about her own five breakthroughs whether they are accidental or on purpose. Her speech is very similar to her TED talk, which I found later after the conference. I really admire her talent and definitely jealous in that she has found her passion in doing something she love hence she is able to be so successful at such a young age. Here's the TED talk. Her introductory poem, B, is definitely my favorite out of all her poems.


During her speech she also performed "Hands" and a poem dedicated to her teacher/principal Mrs. Robero who recently passed away. You definitely feel the emotion by the end of her last poem. Structurally, I think she did a great job as a public speaker. She started off fun and inviting and ended with thought and emotion. On thing from her speech really stood out to me: "Never forget why you do what you do".

Here is her "Hands" poem. I don't like how she rushed through it in this video. Compared with this old video, she is definitely a more experienced performer now.

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After an impressive opening ceremony (I really like Sarah Kay), I had high expectations for SLC. Unfortunately that expectation was quickly shattered when I attended the next event. The feature presentation I attended was by Ajay Puri. I think the whole point his speech was everything that became successful all came from a single idea. An idea can create a movement. Now I still don't know what Ajay Puri does as occupation. He seem to do a bit of both. But he is very entertaining in his words of speech so the presentation wasn't too bad. I learned some random things too:

1) I think it's really cool his father, Papa Puri, is travelling and starting his own cooking blog and class after retirement. I really wish my dad would do something like this, like starting a cooking class.

2) Couchsurfing: awesome way to travel

3) Story of the Red Paper Clip: just pure amazing; why can't I sell/trade my stuff online while this guy was able to get a house with just a red paper clip! =____=

4) Store Buyout: a really crazy idea but it definitely made that guy's day

5) Vancouverisawesome: a site on vancity culture

6) masalapuri: Ajay Puri's twitter...this guy founded so many different organizations (and I think is very random)

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Next on the agenda was a workshop. I joined "Team Member Mayhem". I thought it was a workshop teaching you how to deal with different types of people in a group. BUT, it turned out to just teach you to identify the different types of people and how to better match them together in a group. I think it's really pointless because you can't just categorize people like that! Some people are in betweens! And even when  you identified the different personalities, the workshop didn't really teach you how to deal with them...just told them to match it up with other people. +___+ useless.

So basically, this is what I learned from the workshop: the 7 personality types:

1) The Expert

• highly knowledgeable

• lack of innovation, ideas

• needs to be with someone with creativity, in charge, or chatty

2) The Agitator

• always challenging; tends to challenge leader

• you want to ignore this kind of people but they make you think harder (their strength)

3) The Leader

• in charge; delegate meetings

• sometimes tend to get credit for all the ideas

4) The Glue

• gets along with everyone

• friendly, positive energy

• don't like to speak up

5) Chatterbox

• easily distracted and disruptive

• humorous

6) Workhorse

• great aid during emergency

• can work too hard

• likes routine, resistant to change

7) Wild Card

• difficult to motivate/inspire

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Lunch break was okay...was disappointed in the diversity of the info booths there. Found nothing too useful. After lunch I attended the HP Special Workshop. Basically it's one of those goal-setting workshops trying to get you to "find yourself". The presenter Katie Jeanes is really chillax. She is a UBC alum in Kinesiology but ended up starting her own company called "A Little More Good". Now I still don't really get what her company is about...it's about promoting doing good things? It sounds really ambiguous @__@ Not sure how much demand it's getting from the general public.

The workshop is more useful than the morning one. I think a key point Katie pointed out was that 1) make goals and 2) how are you going to get the money to achieve those goals. Here are some useful things I found:

1) Ask a Friend Survey: I really need to send this out to my friends :P
2) Marieforleo: Blogging about online marketing and starting your own business
3) lululemon goal setting sheet
4) katiejeans; katiej@alittlemoregood.com

And I really wanted to make a inspiration board...I think I will once I get my easier to use corkboard up and running!

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Running on 4.5 hours of sleeps, after the workshop, I was pretty tired. I went to Sam Sullivan's feature presentation as my last even before the closing ceremony. I didn't like it. I missed the first part of how he got into an accident and became disabled. The second part, the part I didn't miss, was boring because he started talking about politics and his enlightenment cafes. How is that related to the SLC theme?! And he spoke in such a monotone voice I actually fell asleep. So nothing too memorable there.

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Closing ceremony featured the keynote speaker Neil Pasricha. He is the author of "1000 Awesome Things, a blog that became a bestseller. The blog itself is pretty awesome. There were some really neat posts. His principle is to focus on the little things that brighten people's day. To illustrate this, he had everyone write down something that make them happy on a card from our SLC name tags and exchange it with someone we don't know. I wrote "watching snowfall at 3AM"and coincidently exchanged with another girl who have the same name as me (my name is so common =__=).

His presentation was A for average. Unlike Sarah Kay's, it wasn't particularly memorable nor outstanding in my opinion. You can practically find his entire speech on his TED Talk:


He also shared some funny positive videos which I thought was adorable:





But overall, the closing ceremony didn't wow me. By the end of the day, SLC did show me a lot of cool things but do I think it's worth the money? No I don't. I hope to be a volunteer for next year because it's so much better than a delegate. You can in for free and you get a free shirt. Delegates, on the other hand, have to pay and return their nametags?! No way, I kept mine. I needed a souvenir lol. And I better get my free registration >:)

I think SLC is something you should attend once when you attend UBC but is it worth going year after year, paying $30 for it? No I don't think so.