How to Get Involved at CSU

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Well, how's it going? Everyone welcome to our presentation for slice and how to get involved. My name is JD. I'm a business major actually just graduated. Which is awesome. My hometown is love in Colorado. I'm really excited. I notice a lot of y'all are from Colorado in the and for those who are out of state also welcome of course.

Hi everyone, my name is Jessica Dyrdahl. My pronouns are she heard her zan I work with ASU. It's the student government here on campus. And then I also have taught in the presence leadership program which will talk about near the end of the presentation in one of the out of Staters I came to CSU from Fargo ND. So I came here as an undergrad, graduated with political science in Spanish, works at a few different universities around the USN world and then came back a few years ago.

I'm really excited that you all have chosen to join us today and hope that you are excited to learn more about involvement at CSU. Will JD will kick off with a couple of questions.

Alright, just to warm us up here. Uhm, you can type your answers in the chat box and then we will accept those as they come in. First question is what are a few activities you all have been involved with in the past and then the next one is. What are some things were hoping to learn or gain from this presentation?

So I'll just give you a few minutes to type some things in an yeah wait for a few more people to join.

And a little bit about the structure of our presentation is we're going to talk about slice programs as a whole in general, and then we're going to focus on the president's leadership program that will be about 20 or so minutes, total 25, and then will leave some time for questions at the end as well.

Looks like we have someone involved in key club, awesome.

Creative writing, music and science.

Some youth groups, fencing, riding club theater cool. We've gotten involved. Crew here came to the right place.

Honor Society.

Softball

future business leaders of America. Student government cool.

Awesome, well looks like we got a pretty involved group here. I'm gonna go ahead and move on for the sake of time and then you want to talk a little bit more at the end. That's great too. So let's hop into it.

OK so first just to start a soft. Here's just a few statistics about the slice office. Just to give you some breath as to what we do. So for example we have over 500 student organizations on campus or commonly just known as clubs. There's actually 60 new organizations founded every single year. Those go from academic to outdoor. We had a quidditch club at one point. We're all watching club. At one point there's a club for every major, which is super cool.

About 65% of CSU students are involved through slice at one point during their time at CSU and then Lastly, we offer a leadership minor through our office which is through the president's leadership program, which is what Jess is going to talk about. In the latter part of the presentation.

Speaking of the squirrel watching color by just came into the student center today. An there is a gentleman who every time I come into the student center, which is about once a week, is feeding the squirrels so so they're quite happy. One campus. They have a lot of peanuts from.

Very true, I also had one climb into my lap when I was eating a bagel. One time fun fact. So here's just a few images of some of the programs we have. Won't mean a lot to you right now because you aren't familiar with them quite yet, but it's just to kind of show you how fun are offices bottom left, we have project homeless connect. The middle bottom is TIF. Far right. Is the student leadership of words.

**** a top right is CS unity. The middle one is the president's leadership program and then top left I believe is either a PMP retreat or alternative break.

So I'm just gonna hop right into some things we offer under leadership. Um, first, starting with president's leadership program three or program you can run your leadership minor. I'll save that for just so I'm going to just skip over that one. We have Rams engaging in active leadership, commonly known as real there. One hour workshops that you can attend twice a week. There's you only have to attend 10 over a span of two semesters to earn your leadership certificate, so this is a great opportunity for students who maybe have really packed schedules but still want to get involved.

Alt.

We also have campus step up which is a social justice retreat. I have actually attended this myself two years ago, about 50 to 100 students attended over winter break in January before school starts. Basically you just learn about different social justice issues, things surrounding identities, things like that. This is great for people who want to learn more about social justice but don't really know how. And so this is a great resource for that. But it's also great for individuals who just want to expand their knowledge on the topic and maybe know a little bit, but want to learn more.

Next, under volunteer programs we have cans around the Oval. This is a 30 year program initially started by a student. It was initially initially started as a canned food drive. The first year that it happened. I believe we put cans around the elbow. I'm not sure if y'all are familiar with the Oval, but it's basically just a huge plot of land at CSU. Super gorgeous has a bunch of trees in it, but anyways the cans went around the Oval. Maybe halfway space foot apart and then over the years it started wrapping around more and more and more.

So it got to the point where it was too much labor to really do that anymore. Um, so now we just collect food into bins and also a monetary donations which we focus a little bit more on. Just because we can do more with money with the Larimer County Food Bank.

Next we have flights. Adaptive swim, commonly known as sass. This is another 30 year program started by a student. This program, however, is twice, once or twice a week all year as a student volunteer, you're partnered with the participation of any age within the community who has a physical or mental disability. You basically just play around in the water at Epic Center.

Not a swimming lesson or anything like that. Some people do laps in some people. Just wait in the water. It's more just about building relationships and it also can help cognitive abilities and motor function and things like that.

Next we have alternative break. This is when the coolest programs. This is my biggest regret at CSU is that I never attended one of these. If I could go back I would. It's a service learning trip. There's about 15 to 17 different trips that you can go on over spring break. There is one offered in the winter as well. That's a little bit longer and its international. Each service learning trip is focused on a different social justice issue and your student group works with a government agency or a nonprofit.

In that specific area, for example, uhm, just off the top of my head, my A few, my friends went to Las Vegas to work with the human trafficking problem. Um, that's just one example. There's one, uh, let me think Taos, New Mexico works with building earthships. If you don't know what that is, I definitely check it out. It's basically just sustainable housing, so each are very different social justice issues. But all super great opportunities to learn. Also, we have information sessions.

In October, so I would definitely recommend attending those, and that's also when applications open.

Next we have Rams Against Hunger. This is an initiative to help prevent food insecurity on campus. It's an umbrella term for a bunch of different programs. For starting off, we have the mobile food pantry it's offered once a month. It's actually going through the summer during the week as well, which is full. As a student, you can access it and get up to 50 pounds of free food. And if you wanted to, you can also volunteer to help distribute that food. We also have pocket pantries on campus, which is a smaller version of that. There's about five or six different locations, so if you're in between classes, you need a quick snack for free.

Uh, we have granola bars there. Putting all kinds of really good stuff. Peanut butter. Things like that, uh? We also have something called student giving day for those who have nail spiked programs for the dining Hall, they're able to donate their unused guest meal slides once the semester I believe. And then those are then allocated to a ram in need. So that is a super great program as well. And then Lastly, we have project homeless connect. It's in the springtime an it's once a year about 100 nonprofits or government agencies.

Offer their services for free to individuals experiencing homelessness or families experiencing homelessness, but this is as a volunteer. You're partnered with someone who's taking advantage of these resources and you just walk them around. Maybe someone needs a bus pass only and then that's all they want. You can just help them locate that. Talk to him a little bit. We also offer a free meal during that time, so that's another good one.

So now I'm going to move on to involvement advising. Uhm, I always recommend this to transfer students or first years for those who maybe aren't familiar with campus yet and want to get involved. But maybe aren't sure what to do. So you just sign up on line on our website, pick a time in a date that works best for you. You'll fill out a questionnaire when you pick your date and time very short just asks you like what you've been involved in in the past, but you're interested in any questions you might have. And then from the time that you fill out that questionnaire to the time that you go to.

Your appointment, your involvement. If I said that you chose, has done a ton of research about campus off-campus, opportunities within slice outside of slice, just anything that you wrote involving that. So. Then when you get there, they give you an Action Plan, talk you through it a little bit, and then you walk away with a ton of resources. Basically, the point of it is to take the pressure off of you and to put it on to us so you don't have to search for all these things and we for you. And there's also no pressure to sign up for anything that we.

Give you resources for. It's just for your information.

So this is just a little screenshot of our website itslights.colostate.edu. Or you can just search lycius you comes up either way. If you Scroll down you'll see this these three pillars. I just like to call him leadership, involvement and engagement under those it has all of the things that you can find if you press discover under it, such as real, under leadership, press discover to learn more about that or under engagement. Sass, you can click discover to learn a little bit more, so that's a good way to do a little bit of research on your.

Hum.

Another great's website, isramblingramblingcolostate.edu, or again you can just Google it. Ramlink CSU. That's kind of how I do it, 'cause I can never remember URLs. This is how student organizations communicate with students on campus. Or like I said, commonly known as clubs. So if you click organizations a giant master list of all student organizations on campus will come up on the left hand side. You can search specific ones.

Are categorized them by academic outdoor things like that. This is also a great way for student organizations to post, like coming meeting times or upcoming events under the events tab in the left. Another cool function through this website is say you're an avid skier or snowboarder and you don't know the name of a specific club, but you just want to be involved in something regarding snow. You can just search snow in the search bar and all student organizations regarding snow will come up and then you can just click on them in contact them.

So last to conclude, my part of the presentation, I just compiled 7 helpful tips to get involved. First one is to check out the slice website which we went. Went over great way to just do some research on by yourself. I just scratch the surface on some things I talked about. There's plenty of other things that slice offers, so I'd look into that. Bring your friend and be open to making new ones as a first year can be a little intimidating trying to make new friends, so asking someone to in your Hall to come to a club meeting with you or volunteer with you.

Great way to get that bond with that person, but also to meet new people who are interested in things that you're interested in. Ask the slice front desk. Our reception knows literally everything. They're highly trained individuals. If they don't know the answer to your question, they likely know someone who would. And so stopping in our office and just asking them questions is also a great resource.

Involvement advising appointment. As I went over takes the pressure off of you and puts it on to us to help you figure out what you might wanna do at CSU for extracurricular stuff. Go into ram link. This is a good way to maybe look at student orgs that you could join when school starts, so that way you can just do your research in the summer and then not miss that first club meeting when school starts.

Follow slice on social media. I am the marketing coordinator for the slice office, currently through the summer. Uh, we post a lot of things out like deadlines, things coming up, not just through our office but through other offices in the Lory Student Center, an on campus. Kind of works. Functions as somewhat of a newsletter, so I'd recommend following us our handle on Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter and Facebook. Is sly CSU all lower Case No anything else.

And then my last piece of advice is to just go. It's a little intimidating as a first year. I honestly didn't participate in a lot of things. I kind of just hung out with my friends. Nothing wrong with that, but it did lead to me missing a lot of opportunities. And then when I became a senior I realized it was too late for me to do a lot of things, especially now that I'm graduating. I definitely have hard FOMO fear of missing out, and so I just recommend to just go. Be brave and have fun so.

Yeah, thank you so much for listening to my portion of the presentation. Welcome to CSU and I'm gonna hand it off to just now.

Perfect thanks JD. I definitely just want to reiterate two of the portions at JD mentioned so one that involvement advising is such a great way to really help narrow down items that you want to be involved with.

There really is a place for you within the slice community, so whether it's joining a registered group or starting one, I think, like, for instance, someone put in the chat that they really enjoy cooking. So if we don't have a cooking club at CSU, you could start one, so just wanted to reiterate those two things, so I'm going to start talking about the president's leadership program, and I'm curious if you all could put in the chat when you think of the word leadership, what is either one?

Action or maybe 1 trait that comes to mind when you hear the word leader or leadership.

Will allow some of those to just come through.

The present leadership program is a way to get involved and improve on your leadership skills so it could be.

We have different components which I'll go through in a second, but if you want to do the full program, you get a leadership minor at the end. But you can also just participate in one year or the program as well, so just want to read some of the some of the words that you shared, so giving when you think of leader, collaborative, motivational, open-minded, selfless, responsible, trustworthy, taken action on your own, or rather than waiting for someone else to do it so.

Confident, hardworking. Definitely all those things come into play when we're thinking of leadership. If you do have other miners plan, thank you Eva for your question. You can double or triple minor to get the leadership minor so oftentimes will see students at maybe are majoring in engineering, but then there minoring in leadership and potentially a foreign language. Or maybe they have two majors and one minor. So we just really encourage you to work closely with your academic advisor.

To see how the leadership minor can fall, fall into your schedule. But it is an interdisciplinary minor so it does not matter what your major or other miners are. You could still do it, and it just depends on your.

The length of time to graduate because if you have more than just one like major minor, you might be, you know, taking classes for four and a half years or potentially five years depending on how everything shakes out. So great question.

So here's the mission of the presence. Leadership program is to develop active, informed civic leaders who practice ethical, inclusive leadership and embody positive, humanitarian correct characteristics such as optimism, service to others, passion, mindfulness and fairness. and I read that too, because that I think really embodies the program is we are not here to say. This is one way to be a leader. We're here to give you the resources so you can grow in your own leadership abilities and skills and be able to impact the communities that you all are involved in. 'cause leadership.

For me and my approach might be a little bit different than JD at her approach, so, but those are just the components that we really look for.

Really try to promote.

It currently the presence leadership program is based on the social change model of leadership development. If any of you are familiar with that and kind of the way I break it down as we focus on leadership individually as yourself. So what are your values? What are the identity is that you hold and then moves from leadership in a group setting? So how do we collaborate with individuals? How do we have controversy with civility? So we all aren't going to have the same ideas, but how do we still dialogue and come to maybe common goals? And then the third part is that citizenship, peace?

Where it's more so, um, talking about engaging in your community more broadly and so that could be.

Maybe the Fort Collins community. Or maybe it could be your communities back home or could be even the global community. As JDS said, we have different international opportunities as well.

So you can see for the present leadership program that there's different components is not just a class, and so class is a big portion of it where you would meet every Tuesday evening from 4:00 to 6:00 PM. So it's a two credit class and it doesn't meet for an entire academic career. The classes are taught by two instructors, so you'd have instructors from a different areas of campus, which is really great. We have public achievement, which is a program where students are able to go into.

High schools and work with high school students to do service learning opportunities. We have research, so if you're doing the leadership minor, you have two options. One is to do public achievement or the other is to do a research paper and presentation. So just depends on where your interest level eyes we have. Our global leadership experience and so we take students. We've taken students to different places around the world, so we've gone to China two years ago. We took students you got in Rwanda.

Last year we went to um Colorado State University's campus in total, Santos, Mexico, and so we took students down there.

And we're planning on this ear, but with Kobe, obviously we're taking a pause on that, but I'm just trying to have that global experience as well.

We have different calculate curricular leadership opportunities so um JD was mentioning the different real workshops in different opportunities to get involved but we have a leadership field experience too which is essentially an internship that you do during your second year appeal P so you might be paired up with a CSU Department or maybe a nonprofit in town or a local business and able to learn from them and their leadership skills we've actually had students that have been hired out of those.

Places that they were Partnership for their internship in the past. So a lot of different ways to get involved.

So here's a little bit I know that's a lot of information on the page, but a little bit of breakdown of our different courses. So like I said, with the social change model building on yourself as a leader in a group setting than the bigger community sending that's how we like to model our courses. So the first year called to lead is really focusing more so on yourself. The leadership styles is the year that you would do the leadership, field experience or internship is. How does then that navigate? Working with different groups and then effective leadership?

Oftentimes the students are taking the lead in the class is on all of 'em are very much discussion based and experiential learning, so you'll never come to class and just be lectured at for 2 two hours. It will involve different podcasts, different scenarios. It will have different activities, so definitely should appeal to different learning styles within the classroom as well.

So here's a little bit more breakdown of that public achievement. An research that we were mentioning with the leadership minor and the research. We really hope that it aligns with what you're doing for your career. Hopefully so we had a student this last spring, for instance, that research. She was a.

The Biomedical Engineering Major and she was researching like a new form of.

Hope what are they called like? Half questions for horses and like actually design Matt and was able then to present on that and then we have people that we're focusing on education or people that are focusing more so on their science based courses. So that can really pertain to whatever your major is.

So there's the, UM, different credit, so we're talking about for the global leadership experience, culture, color, and then the PMP passion events. So we've done different things where we've had a PMP Book Club in the past will encourage people to go into the community as a group. Often times we have students work on different like try to provide service opportunities and the first year of a call to lead you actually do a service weekend. So you go into different communities.

Focus on a social justice issue. So, for instance, even in Fort Collins here we had our students focus on the criminal justice system and in Fort Collins. We're kind of in the forefront of alternative sentencing, so there's a lot of different options for that. And then. So, for instance, people are arrested for possession of drugs, or not necessarily immediately thrown in jail. They could have like a work release program or something like that.

And then also talking about, you know criminal justice system in general. If you haven't seen the movie, just mercy, I highly recommend it. That's one of the movies that we watch for that service began.

Free right now streaming on all the different websites. Service streaming services I guess. So these are the steps to the Interdisciplinary Studies Minor. The main thing is you would be completing the course work and then doing the option of that public achievement or research assignment. So if you wanted to do.

If you want to do more research on PMP, you just go to pmp.colostate.edu. You can follow us as well. So since we do meet on Tuesdays.

We always do our PMP. Tuesday is on our social media so you can follow us on Instagram if you like. Just noticing that I'm I'm going to wrap up to open it. It to you all to see if you have any additional questions will give you some time to do that, and if not, JD can share a little bit more about her experience as a student, but just wanted to see if you all had any questions. I think kind of going back to Avis. Questions about other fitting in the minor is, I think, a big question we get is if you can study abroad.

And still get the leadership minor. and I would say Yes, a good portion of our students study abroad, so that might look like taking the three years, of course is maybe studying abroad your third year, let's say, and you could do your third year. Of course work, and then the leadership minor final requirement at the same time. Feel like I explain that in convoluted way, but it is definitely possible if you're wanting to study abroad to still get the leadership minor.

So just see if you all have any questions.

I'll put the piano.

Or.

Nation about anything that I talked about I can dive deeper into anything like alternative break are something like that as well. Or you can just ask me a question about being a student. I was there awhile so.

Hello.

Yeah, great question. JD, do you want to talk a little bit about the involvement Expo?

Yeah exactly uhm so we haven't involvement Expo at the beginning of each semester in the fall it's not only outside and then in this spring it gets moved inside just because it's Colorado and it might snow you just never know the one in the fall I mean yeah in the falls a lot bigger about 200 student organizations sign up for it as I mentioned there's about 500 on campus so not everyone is there but a good portion of them are it's actually super fun there's music and the ram is there are sometimes it goes all day at the.

In the Plaza, which is just at the heart of campus, in front of the Lory student center. So good way to just see like what clubs are on campus. So yeah, beginning of each semester and you'll see advertisements for it when you get to CSU.

And I think for as far as how soon do clubs usually start I think a lot of amused that involvement Expo time to really recruit new members and then will typically have their first maybe welcome meeting the next week or two. As far as applying for most, I would say my experience. No, it's like.

Come, we want people with similar interests to to be in this space. Whether it's You are woman who likes the outdoors or you really want to learn more about being a stem major or I started the we love North Dakota Club. Not a lot of people wanted to join that.

I think that they do really use that involvement Expo time to start.

I'm thinking of some of our fraternity and sorority life. Organizations do have like a pretty.

Structured process to go through in order to join some of those organizations. If you were looking to join Greek life, but most are, you know come join a lot of our faith based organizations are associated maybe with different places in town too. So it's even like helps to bridge a CSU in Fort Collins community.

And then Mac. The question about agricultural related organizations at CSU, yes, definitely a lot. So how JD was talking about ramling? How you can just put in a word in search. So I would encourage going to Ram Lincoln. Just say agriculture and see what it brings up and then if you're in the science in which I know I say agricultural weird because of the information.

But they have a lot of different student groups that are within the college. Then there also are groups, just bigger as well. We have also, I don't know if you've heard of our deck. It's the agricultural research, development and economic center that's part of our campus is not on main campus. It's actually a few miles away. But there's a lot of lot of time student groups will meet out there. It's a really great space that they do a lot of.

Development out there.

And I did just go on Ram Lincoln. I saw the first thing that came up when I typed agricultural was the Agricultural Council. And then I also saw that there is a fraternity that is agriculturally based. So I would go and run like that just to look a little bit more. I didn't dive that deep so.

There's another leadership group called agricultural ambassadors that works at a lot of our CSU like externally facing events as well. Most colleges actually do have ambassadors for their different colleges, with whether it's a donor event or in this case with agriculture investors. The National Western stock show that takes place in Denver. They do a lot of work with that.

Great questions. Anything else on people's mind?

And as far as starting organization again, it was just three students and an adviser correct 80.

OK.

Yeah, and a constitution which we provide the outline for it so.

I think to another thing I would recommend is when you do, if you are physically coming to campus in the fall is definitely connect with a slice office, your resident assistant or are a.

Typically are really knowledgeable to about helping you navigate what some of your interests levels are. If you are choosing to stay home and just taking classes online, we're still going to be offering a lot of virtual engagement opportunities through slice, so we're definitely going to have a hybrid model of different ways to be involved and get engaged, so it's not just going to be one or the other. It will definitely be a mixture, so that's one. Definitely cool.

Thing as well.

And JD and I will hang out here for a few more minutes, but if no one else hasn't questions on your, definitely free to enjoy the rest of your afternoon. But like I said, We'll we'll hang out here for a couple more minutes to see if anyone else has questions, but thank you all so much for joining us and hopefully you learn something about slice.

Thank you.

Of course, thank you for joining.

Thank you toria.

Jinx

The.

Thanks for joining Kayla.

So, Gabriela, Eric, if you all have any questions, definitely let us know.

OK, I think we're gonna sign of-, but thanks for joining us and you all have a Good afternoon.

Right?