MU offers first campus-wide leadership conference
Students will be notified on whether they were accepted Friday.
Published Oct. 15, 2010
MU plans to hold the Mizzou Leadership Academy, its first campus-wide leadership conference, Nov. 6.
Dave Roberts, one of the chairmen of the Mizzou Leadership Academy said the conference is sponsored by the Department of Student Life, the Department of New Student Programs, the Office of Student Organizations and the Center for Leadership Development. Funding for the program will come from Student Life.
“We haven’t had any large-scale leadership conferences for every student to attend that is really representative of the larger campus community,” Roberts said. “If you look at a lot of the other Big 12 schools, they have large (conferences).”
In order to attend the conference, students were nominated by a faculty member to apply or could apply on their own. Faculty nominations were due by Oct. 1, and students had until Oct. 8 to turn in their applications. Those accepted to attend will be notified Friday, said Roberts.
“It’s a two-part process,” said Dave Rielley, one of the chairmen of the Mizzou Leadership Academy. “We’re reserving about 75 percent of the spots for students who are nominated and those of us who are organizing the conference, we’ve been going around to different areas of the campus and encouraging (people) to nominate students.”
Roberts said they are hoping to have 200 students in attendance, and students who are selected to attend may only attend once during their time at MU.
“We want them to know that the University of Missouri is really focused on fostering leadership development on campus because we know it will benefit (students) when they’re here and when they leave here,” Roberts said. “We feel like we are such a big campus and we’re so diverse. We really want to give students an opportunity to get together.”
According to the Leadership Academy’s website, the three goals of the conference are to provide students with educational resources for leadership, help them foster relationships with fellow campus leaders and to help students expand their involvement at MU for their four years in college and their life after school.
At the conference, students will attend leadership training sessions and there will be guest speakers, including Chancellor Brady Deaton and Chad Pregracke, the founder of Living Lands and Waters, an organization devoted to cleaning up America’s rivers.
Jake Strickland, one of the student members on the steering committee for the conference, said they pulled some ideas from other leadership trainings MU has held in the past, though none of them have been as large and inclusive as this one.
Strickland said the steering committee is made up of student leaders throughout campus and they have been coordinating the events at the conference.
“We’re just helping through the planning process,” Strickland said. “We were all chosen because we had all been involved in various organizations throughout the campus.”
The steering committee has been in charge of things like picking out the speakers for the conference and getting the word out about it, said Strickland.
“We want it to foster leadership development as well as getting people from different organizations that maybe wouldn’t have the opportunity to talk to each other,” Strickland said. “This is cooperation between student leaders as well as helping them develop.”