College can be a tough time for students. In several cases, people enter without any certainty or confidence. With this in mind, the Leadership Speaking Series project was created to impact students’ lives by helping them through tough times.
Cassie Fulk, manager of Student Activities and Leadership Development, alongside several student ambassadors were responsible for creating this project. The Leadership Speaking Series project started Oct. 2020, but the idea was born when classes were moved to remote back in March 2020.
“I would say kind of the first seeds of this project (Leadership Speaking Series) was a little beyond that (October 2020)” Fulk said. “I would say probably when we went remote back in March of last Spring is when we started to think about it more…and this Semester we were ready to go.”
The project consists in a series of four professional speakers, who were selected carefully to talk about different topics of the everyday struggles of many people. The purpose of the project is to promote leadership to students. Camile Mullings, a student ambassador and one of the project’s founders feels that the project will promote leadership.
“I think it is [going] to promote leadership to students who actually need it,” Mullings said. “To provide them with an individual who can motivate them and who can inform them about the thing that are going around them.”
The process of finding the right speakers to achieve the purpose was a long one. The list of speakers selected were all researched with one goal, to find people who could not only impact the student but do it virtually via Zoom. The four speakers who were selected were Darryl Bellamy Jr., Tiana Soto, Tim Mousseau and Sara Lowery.
Bellamy Jr. will open the series of speeches on Feb. 18, where he will talk about overcoming your fears. Soto will follow up, on March 18, to talk about stress and how to deal with it. She will be followed by Mousseau, on April 1, where he will share his story on sexual assault to create awareness on the topic. Finally, the series will be close by Lowery on April 29, that will ask you the question, “Would you follow you?”
“I think that each one of these speakers touch on something that we all experience every single day,” Fulk said. “Tim is going to touch on a lot of things that we may not all have personally experienced, but really helping us to support that community and to come alongside people.”
“Plus, to provide understanding too because some of us won’t experience it, we don’t understand it,” Mulling said.
Fulk said students should attend this series to have life changing moments depending on how the subject touches them.
“Looking over my life, these events and interaction really helped me to mold my path, and to sometimes correct my path,” Fulk said. “Someone could come and really be able to relate to it, and it totally could change their perspectives.”
Fulk and Mullings hope the project will be around for a long time, but the work needs to be done right now so the project can grow. Student are encouraged to come to the events.
By Matheus Camossa