Executive Board leaves Florida with more than a tan

Rebecca Jordan

Junior News Editor

Four Student Senate officers attended a variety of workshops aimed at improving leadership skills at the second annual Lead 365 conference held on Nov. 5-7 in Orlando.

Senate president Everett McNair hopes to use what he learned to improve the workings of the Senate itself. “Because we experience such a quick cycle of students who go through the Senate, I would like to start the tradition of a training session that we do every year three or four weeks into the fall semester. This way, after that time period, we’re a full-functioning Senate that knows how everything works,” he said. “I filled a whole notebook with ideas for the Senate.”

“The conference taught us personally to be better leaders. We can give that knowledge to other campus leaders at Hudson Valley, and then they can go back to their clubs with that knowledge. So it hopefully has a domino effect,” Student Senate treasurer Josiah Dillon said.

Brody O’Connor, the Student Senate secretary, described the conference: “[Lead 365] ties together a lot of student leaders from across the nation and the globe, and also different speakers from all different schools who talk about what their campuses are doing successfully. All the student leaders coming together to talk about the things that their campuses do well helps other campuses bring those ideas back home.”

Bryce Kirk, the Senate vice president, has already been putting what he learned in a workshop at Lead 365 about forming relationships to good use on campus: “I’ve actually begun to start conversations with people. I met a lot of people in the last two weeks just by saying, ‘Oh hey, how ya doing?’ We stop and talk for a while, and before you know it, you have a friend. I’ve learned to be more open with people.”

I feel a lot of times that with people in leadership positions, the longer you’re in that position of power, you tend to stray a little bit. The conference was a good realignment of the values that we ran on and the values we have as human beings to kind of put us back in check,” said Dillon.

The All-Club Meeting was one of the most visible products of last year’s conference. The Student Senate officers do not have any big policy changes or new ideas for campus in the works as a direct result of this year’s Lead 365 conference.  They hope that by improving the Senate itself, this will lead to better leadership in the future.