Working as an advisor for Student’s Affairs, I found that the seminar of Academic Contributions to Student Leadership Development was fruitful to my work in my home country. Penn State University show me best practice of engaging students’ involvement since there are a variety of activities and faculty have made an effort to improve student’s leadership skills.
The session I like most was when Student leaders shared their experience as university leaders with the audience. Most of them had positive attitude toward university work and they agreed that passion was the key for a success. Also, they pointed out that skills for being leadership were being passionate, keeping motivated, believing that they could make a difference and being approachable.
Their leadership skills not just came from classroom, but also outside class, for example driving force in themselves (Bible), extracurricular activities and team building. More important, they have to manage time wisely.
Compare to Thai student leaders, they’d similar characteristic; however, they struggle wih time management. To illustrate, students who have leadership skills tend to spend more time doing extracurricular activities to studying. They sometimes cannot balance their study and extracurricular activities which often consumed their time. No doubt, some student leaders’ GPAs were unsatisfactory.
From my observation, Penn State University has put an attempt to connect students with a faculty / university so the staff had created many social media tools to get student involved. In Thailand, many universities also had tried to encourage students to update and learn about current activities, by creating for example, Facebook Group, put volunteer activities as part of the degree to motivate students to work in a community, even waiving study fee for students’ who have outstanding practice for volunteer affairs, putting outstanding students who got awards nationwide on the university website.
In conclusion, to promote students to establish leadership skills, I found that extracurricular activities helped them to become leaders in the long run. It is not possible that these skills can be accomplished in a short time; on the other hand, it takes a lot of time. Thus, lecturers can be mentors who give advice to students to manage their time, but at the same time find time to learn outside the box.
--------------------------------Date: Monday 12 Sep 2011
Venue: Ballroom, Nittany Inn, PSU
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