Hello NAITSA members! 

Well the new semester is quickly approaching and I am preparing for the best year yet. I am excited for all the opportunities and services that we will be providing this year and I cannot wait till these halls are no longer empty.

A great way to get the most of your school experience is to get involved in your NAIT community. Since I started at NAIT, I have participated in many of the extracurricular events around campus including Business Connex of NAIT, a student run club. Through this I have met new people, learned new professional and life skills, got a great job, and had a great time doing it!

I know the saying “open door policy” is overused, so I won’t…but I do believe this, and I strongly encourage you to stop by and give me a shout. I took this job primarily because I believe in the student body and all that we can achieve. The more students I meet the better I can position myself to represent you and meet all your needs. I would love to hear what you have to say on a one on one basis in the hallways or over a beer.

Whether its related to school or not, I am here to help you succeed. I am in my 4^th year of my accounting degree and as a result I have had the opportunity to experience many of the services on campus. I really enjoy guiding students through their stay here at NAIT and helping them find the opportunities at NAITSA that will provide them the most value.  

Thanks for reading and don’t forget to come say Hi or poke me in the hallways.

Take care,

Govind Pillai

Hello again,

The past week saw the NAITSA Executive Council travel to the beautiful and scenic Red Deer for the Alberta Students’ Executive Council Goal Setting Conference.  ASEC is the provincial advocacy group for over 120,000 students from 12 post-secondary institutions. I happen to be the Vice Chair of ASEC, so I was quite busy the entire week.

The objective of the conference is to get input from the membership (12 students’ associations and unions) regarding our goals for the year well as policies which need to be created.  Both of these were accomplished and much will be done this year to help students on the provincial level.  Some professional development was also done, including a speech from the mayor of Red Deer, Morris Flewwelling, regarding lobbying on a municipal level.  Jason Roth, NAITSA’s Director of Advocacy, gave a speech on lobbying provincially and Michael Donlevy from Red Deer College spoke about effective fundraising.

I also met with Mayor Mandel this morning to discuss the City Center Airport and LRT to NAIT.  Both provide important opportunities for future NAIT students.

Until next time.

Tim

Here’s the pic of my office under construction.

Content: Third Day

Three of the sessions from Day 3 were regarding conflict management, developing your personal strategic advantage when looking for work, and communicating between Gen Y and the Baby Boomers. I enjoyed these sessions but found they were a bit introductory, and believe I would have appreciated a bit more depth. Overall, they were a good entry point for some interesting topics.

Networking Event

Day 3 had a dinner/networking event with about a dozen local business leaders. This was a great time to network and meet some interesting individuals. I had the opportunity to chat with a representative from Shell, so it was pretty cool to pick his brain about Shell’s business model in our area.

Hello folks,

It’s been an interesting start to the year here at NAITSA.  I’ve been out of the office at conferences and retreats almost as much as I’ve been in the office.  To make things more interesting, the office is undergoing window replacement, so things are in shambles.  I’ll include a picture of what things look like when I figure out how to add pictures.

Myself, the Vice Presidents and the NAITSA staff have been working feverishly to get ready for the upcoming year.  A big part of my summer so far has been the negotiations of the NAIT/NAITSA agreements.  This is a long process; however, I am confident we will come to an agreement that works for both NAIT and NAITSA.

Another big part of my summer so far has been my involvement with the Alberta Students’ Executive Council (ASEC), our provincial lobby organization.  I was elected the Vice Chair of the organization and we’ve been busy brainstorming lobby priorities and campaigns for the year ahead.  Keep your eyes and ears open for something we’re calling “Volunteering to be Debt Free.”  I’m incredibly excited, as this could be something huge for students and communities.

I’ll be in the office for a couple more days, then off to the last conference of the summer in Red Deer, where the ASEC Board will finalize our lobby priorities for the year.

Feel free to send me an email, drop in to the office or give me a call if you have any questions or concerns.

Oh, and Germany lost out of the World Cup.  A sad day indeed.

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged so here I go.

Leader’s Hall

Things that were great about it: Excellent networking opportunities, great hotel and conference venue, beautiful campus, and a few good sessions. Of the good sessions, there was Drew Dudley, a former executive and Shinerama coordinator from out east. I found him to be an entertaining, engaging, and interesting speaker with lots of good stories and life advice, but there wasn’t a whole lot of professional development out of it. He was a good choice for the first speaker of the conference though, as he was relatively inspirational for new executives. I suppose maybe because I’ve already got a year behind me I didn’t find his session as helpful as maybe a first year executive might. The next useful speaker was Jeff Rybak (on the last day). He gave some insight to CFS and talked about how to work with your administration, and gave some good advice on who to speak to on campus when you’re looking for info. Unfortunately, his advice comes from a University, which didn’t help me out a whole lot. The last part of the conference that I felt was good was the Round-Table discussion on the last day, where it was an open and honest conversation about the quality of the conference and what can be done better in future years. I felt that it was incredibly productive and that future conferences will be able to build off of our feedback.

Things that weren’t so great about it: One of the speakers was Steve Pilote, who talked about a lot of different things, in particular personality types. He broke it up into four different types. I was definitely a three way tie between Ponderer, Elaborator, and Harmonizer, with Commander pretty close behind. Frankly, I did not find that session particularly helpful. I think the reason all of us are in the leadership positions that we are in is because we are a healthy mix of all of these personality types – not just one. I hate these personality labels. I am not a harmonizer. I am not an elaborator. I am not a ponderer. I am not a commander. I am Tessa. I have my own strengths and weaknesses that may or may not align with some of those labels. But I refuse to label myself or anyone else as one of those. Just my two cents on that session.

Overall, what I got out of Leader’s Hall was mostly the networking opportunities. Never having been to a national student conference before, it was fascinating meeting other student executives from around the country and hearing what we have in common and what differs between the issues we deal with and how our institutions and students’ associations actually run. The idea-sharing with the other executives was also really valuable.

One thing I must mention is that I am very jealous of the University of Calgary because of the following:

I wish we had a classroom like that at NAIT. Virtual Reality Research Laboratory sound AWESOME!

Moving on…

NAIT is replacing all of the windows in the NAITSA offices. Unfortunately, this means that we have been displaced from our regular working space. It’s frustrating to say the least, especially with only having access to my email through my phone. This makes my job a bit more difficult than usual since I am connected through wireless rather than hardwire. Working off of a Mac means I have no access to the VPN network – which means no email to my computer unless I’m hardwired. I’m being patient though, and doing my best. My office is actually just about finished, only it reeks like fresh commercial paint and the fumes are likely to make me pass-out if I were to work in there for more than an hour. So for now, I sit in our front lobby with my laptop on my lap doing what work I can.

So what have I been doing during all of this construction? Working on SMART goals have been a big thing. I’m working on policies, which is a goal I’ve carried forward from last year. I’ve been reading a lot of them and writing a lot of them and bothering my co-workers for feedback on a lot of them. I won’t be the only person sick of policies by the end of the year. I’m also working on drafting updates to some of our bylaws that are in dire need of it so that when Senate is elected in September we can get right to work. I’ve got lots of other stuff on the go as well, but I won’t go into it now.

Next Week and Later

Next week, all of the Executives will be at the Alberta Students’ Executive Council Goal-Setting Conference being held in Red Deer. The week after I will be back in my office (that hopefully won’t be filled with paint fumes) and will be spending that week catching up on work I missed and continue making progress on the many projects I have on the go.

And that’s the update. Cheers!

-Tessa

Content: Second Day

The sessions at the conference which began the next morning were absolutely great and featured a Shinerama legend, Drew Dudley. Drew has years of experience and insight around what we can do to put on great events as well as tips to succeed in our year with the Students’ Association. I felt as though Drew was a master VP Campus Life who has moved on and grew on so many levels. From changing what might be weighing your organization down, to risk management, idea generating, to life advice; I really enjoyed Drew’s speech and thought he was the perfect person to have speaking at Leaders Hall.

One session which was met with a bit of controversy was an info session/workshop on four different personality types. The session was put on by Steve Pilot from People First HR. In his workshop Steve was letting us know about 4 different personality types, the ponderer, commander, harmonizer, and elaborator.

I was an elaborator, which means I’m always excited about a bigger and brighter tomorrow. I contribute great ideas and am usually the life of the party. Now my weaknesses are that I’m usually all over the place with my ideas. I can bring awesome ideas but move on and bounce all over the place. In all honesty, that pretty much sums me up in a nutshell. I know that might be a bad thing, but recognizing our strengths and weaknesses was, in my opinion a huge reason why we attended this conference.

So what does that mean moving forward? I need to find a ponderer to balance my attention span out. The ponderer does, pretty much what his title suggests, which is ponder. Always thinking about the possible outcomes and thoroughly weighing the options before committing to an answer. The ponderer usually pays attention to the details and takes pride in their work. Basically I was told that I should surround my self with at least another ponderer so that they can insure the ideas we come up with are followed through. Because its like I said, I have a hard time finishing.

Now one thing I noticed is that our team, the NAITSA team only had Govind and I in the elaborators group. I can’t remember where Tessa was but I know Tim was in the ponderer group so I think that means Tim and I should be working together on some things, well by some things I mean I should go to Tim for some advice when it comes to some of my crazy ideas because I think his insight may actually be crucial to my year being successful, we’ll have to see.