The workshop I attended is called “Managing Relationships in College,” which took place on 10/8/09 at 12:30-2:30pm in (VC 1-107) the multipurpose room. This workshop falls under the Personal Enrichment category. The goal of the workshop is to improve and promote freshman relationships, whether it be romantic or friendly. It stresses the importance of networking in college. According to the key speaker at the workshop, she said that 44% of jobs are found through networking, so it’s a statistical fact that networking helps people out. The speaker also discussed how to manage relationships with parents now that we as freshmen hold much more responsibility than we used to in high school. She gave advice on how to improve our relationships with our parents, and one of her main points is to discuss the new changes we’re experiencing in college to our parents. The speaker also talked about romantic relationships in college, such as the healthy way to break up or hook up.
I chose this workshop because I was interested in the type of advice we would receive. The workshop actually did take me out of my comfort zone because part of the program was to get up and talk to 5 new people in different sections, introduce each other, find out facts about them, etc. It was sort of like an ice breaker, and this idea might have worked out well if the room wasn’t overcrowded by around 300 people. I ended up talking to around 10 people in a 5 minute period and forgot all their names, except for one person who happened to share a class with me. This workshop was supposed to take place a couple days before the second one that took place today, but the first one got canceled and I think that was the reason for the overcrowding at the workshop I attended.
This workshop fell a little short of my expectations, partly due to the overcrowding, but mostly because it wasn’t very helpful in my opinion. It was also shorter than the expected time and even though I arrived 4 minutes early, I had trouble getting into the workshop due to time announcement errors on their part. I wouldn’t recommend this workshop to anyone unless they have no other option to fulfill their Personal Enrichment workshop category, they just want to attend a rather short workshop, or they really feel like they need relationship advice.