Hey guys,
Hope you had a great week! Can you believe that it is March already! Time flies when you are having fun. I have been really busy this semester working with the Interfraternity Council, Order of Omega, and working at the Viterbi Admission and Student Affairs Office. It has been a whirlwind of a semester and I can’t believe that spring break is only one week away.
Some of the things that have been making this semester fly by have been retreats and conferences. One conference in particular was last weekend and was put on by the Executive Board of Order of Omega. If you haven’t read my blog about what Order of Omega does you can read it here to get a background about the organization. This retreat was targeted to the leaders in the Greek Community. Many presidents of fraternities and sororities signed up and the conference has also been historically an emerging leaders conference. So many new members and sophomores were encouraged by their chapters to sign up to develop leadership skills for possible upcoming positions in the chapter.
A lot of work went into the event on behalf of the Order of Omega board. We have been planning the event since November of last year. The theme of the conference was Innovative Leadership. We brought together keynote speakers like Bill Gibons who manages PR for McDonalds and a lot of other privately held corporations and Terry Murphy who is the President of ARTiCA Energy. he provides strategic and technical guidance to companies working in the renewable energy market. The conference took place at the beautiful Annenberg Community Beach House in Santa Monica and the keynote reception was held at 9 Olives, an upscale restaurant in West Hollywood.
The conference itself started with breakfast at the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority house and then buses were loaded in order to go to the Annenberg Community Beach House. Once we got there the leaders were separated into four groups which rotated between three speakers and one proposal session. The proposal breakout brought all of the leaders of the greek community together to talk about one initiative that we can implement as a community over the next year. We are still compiling all of the results and surveying but we will come up with this year’s proposal soon. The weather was great and we got to eat lunch out on the beach. Then we went to 9 Olives for networking and our keynote speaker Paul Polizzotto, the president of EcoMedia. The speakers were great and I learned a lot about Innovative Leadership and also innovative entrepreneurship. I also met a lot of awesome leaders in the greek community and had a blast with them as well!
I met a lot of great people at the conference!
It was an awesome experience to plan a whole retreat and carry it out to the finish. As you may know I am VP Finance for Order of Omega so I dealt with all of the contracts, collecting money, and making our budgeting sheets and estimates. Our final plan was to come out neutral with the event but we actually ended up making money because of increased interest and good budgeting! I am glad that the conference was a success and I have only heard great things about it. It feels great to have brought this idea to fruition and I am glad that all of our hard work paid off.
See you next week,
Brenton
Now Listening: On Top of the World by Imagine Dragons with Sunshine by Matisyahu on deck.
https://twitter.com/USCBrenton/status/307692595843309571
