October 2020

4 Minutes Read

---

My Junior year was very eventful with plenty of growing pains and lessons learned. Entering my Senior year of college, I applied and got hired as a Paraprofessional Advisor for the Educational Opportunity Program. (I will talk about this experience below in the next section). During my time working there, I personally went and sought out this virtual conference in October called the California Student Leadership Conference. Which, it seems this conference has been happening for a while now but I only heard about it recently in Fall 2020. I haven’t gone to a conference for over a year so I knew this was something I wanted to attend and experience.

Heading into this conference, I kept an open mind about the available workshops and topics that were available for us to attend. One thing I didn’t know that was a bit of a surprise to me was that this conference was politically driven by liberals and the Black Lives Matter Movement. Which, I’m all for as I identify myself as an ally and liberal. This did cause some tension within the chat feature in the conference as many attendees voiced their dissatisfaction that this conference would have these things incorporated. Safe to say that a portion of the attendees decreased after the first hour when the keynote speaker Alicia Garza finished.

Aside from that, I felt like the organizers did a great job running this virtual conference during covid and keeping many people engaged with each other. There was an app that we used on our phones to text in questions during the workshops or to interact with other attendees. The app was called Whova, it was a bit confusing to use at first but I quickly got the hang of it and once I did, surprisingly, I had one of the best days of just chatting with strangers for the whole day. It was super casual and people would crack jokes in the chat and it made the whole using Whova experience even better. Being active in the app gets you points that are displayed on the leaderboard. And once I found out that the top five people on the leaderboard would receive prizes at the end of the conference, my competitive drive kicked into overdrive. Turns out, I’m not the only competitive person on the leaderboard, as you can see the top four were pretty strong lol. We at the top four actually had our own group chat talking about how other people must hate that we are blowing up their phones late into the night (12:00 PM/1:00 AM).

If you want to read my notes on the workshops I attended, I also attached that below. I really enjoyed all the workshops I went to as the ones I picked out were mostly about improving my facilitation skills in a virtual space because the roles and jobs I had during the Covid academic year required me to use those skills. The workshop that was my favorite is learning about all the resources and tools we can use for team-building activities in a virtual space. I loved this because many of the resources shown to us were very new to me, so I screenshotted and wrote down all the ones that I wanted to use.

Overall, this conference was different in many ways but still, it provided me with opportunities to connect and network with like-minded people and also learn valuable skills and resources. I would love to attend this conference again in the future if I’m able, and preferably in person because if I already had a blast in a virtual setting, I know it will be even more enjoyable in person.