Experience #3 Speaking and Listening- Panhellenic Elections

One really unique thing about Eastern's campus is how small and tight knit our greek community is. Because of the small size of our university's campus and our student population Eastern doesn't really have much to do with greek life and our community is very small, only four houses to be exact;These are traditional sorority houses that partake in primary recruitment and are the kinds of houses that are on bad fraternity movies (no it isn't really like the movies). Coming in as a freshman I went through recruitment and started a journey to grow more as a person and experience college life for all that it can be, part of this meant being in leadership positions. Greek members are involved campus wide, there are greek members that work as ASEWU, Health huts, Eastern entertainment, and several other organizations that help bring life to our student body. My interest for getting involved was in Panhellenic, this is basically the board of women that council our four main sororities on campus, I wanted to do PR for our community as a whole not just the one house that I personally am involved in. Because I wanted to be a part of this council of women I learned a lot of valuable skills. From this experience I learned how to write more professional emails, understand reference letters, and resume building; more importantly than those though I also learned how to give a personal speech rather than an informational speech or explanatory speech which I was used to giving from the classes and clubs I was involved in previously. Mind you I ran for a position two years in a row, so I must not have done a very good job with my speech. Anyway, from this experience I learned a lot about what is and isn't important to include in personal speeches and what is. For example, I learned my first year that speeches on a personal story don't always need a large background sometimes it is okay to just include what it was, what you learned, and how it impacted you to change you to how you are now. I didn't get voted in for a position my first round of elections because my story didn't have much of a meaning other than the fact that I was passionate about getting involved. Because of my lengthy speech about nonsense I really did learn that speaking just to be heard doesn't always make the best speeches. I think that I will take this experience and tell my students about it as a potential learning point for them.