From the Student Center to Zoom

This semester I had the opportunity to intern for Temple’s Office of Leadership Development’s L.I.T Team. I served as the Chair of Creative Design and got to do some pretty cool projects while learning so much.

I originally got hired during the fall of 2019, but decided to continue my internship into this year. Normally we put on two in-person conferences each year, but due to the pandemic that all changed. In a typical year, I am responsible for creating the overall theme and designing the layout of the conference.

Unfortunately, since we had to move everything online, everything I had become familiar with changed. At first, I was very unsure of how the concept of a virtual conference would work. Would we get a good turnout? Would people even be interested? If we are virtual, would they even need my position?

After lots of discussion we finally came up with new responsibilities for each intern and I could already see that our first virtual conference was going to be great. My new responsibilities consisted of creating perk packages for the attendees, deciding what to put in the packages, organizing the conference’s wellness workshops, making games for attendees to participate in throughout the week, and helping build our socio app to increase attendee engagement.

One of my favorite parts about this experience was creating the perk package boxes. I liked doing this because while everything was virtual, this was the one thing that they could take and remember our conference by. I also really enjoyed the week of the conference. One, because it was just amazing to see all of our hard work finally come together. But two, I also got to see and hear from some very inspirational speakers.

Although going virtual wasn’t what we had originally planned for, I am still so glad it happened. I learned so much about myself as an employee, but also about the importance of being able to adapt to whatever life throws at you. If there’s one thing that’s been consistent about 2020 it’s adapting to new things that come your way.

If you are a Temple student and want to enhance your leadership skills, I definitely recommend working at the Office of Leadership Development. If you can’t commit to working, you should definitely come to one, or even both, of our conferences. Our next conference is the Inclusive Leadership Conference which will be in February. This is something you really do not want to miss out on!