New Fellows Sessions!

Passion 101 with Eric Cain: 

Brittany Crawn

 

Who are you…most authentically? What do you believe…most deeply? What does the world need…from you?

Now if you have ever visited the Cothran Center for Vocational Reflection, you may have heard these questions before. If you have not, then I strongly encourage you to think about how you would answer these.

We, as New Fellows, were given the incredible opportunity to listen to the Cothran Center Program Director Eric Cain as he helped us explore our purpose and ourselves. The three questions above are the three primary questions for finding someone’s calling.

When we were all asked to answer these questions, I can speak for most that we had no clue how or even if we were doing it correctly. It was a very unique Shucker session as we sat there in the quiet answering these deep and personal questions.  Once we had them written down, we got into groups of three and shared our answers. Once everyone shared in my group, I was relieved because we all seemed to go about it in the same way.

Some groups found that they were all in about the same place in life, some found that they all have a different outlook on life, and others found all of their thoughts, ideas, and actions are centered upon one divine being. Whatever people discovered as a group or individual, it is safe to say that we walked out of our session with a different perspective on life and ourselves than when we walked in.

This Passion 101 session will definitely be extended beyond the hour and a half we spent in the Garden Room, as we continue our life journeys and find our callings. 

Elevator Pitch Session:

Natalia Lopez-Yanez

Some people have a gift of performing in front of audiences, delivering carefully constructed rhetoric, beautiful dances, or delivering powerful messages and emotion through song—I, however, am not one of those people. Public speaking, or public performances of any type, has never quite been up my alley. In early elementary school I had such bad stage fright during the school concerts that my teacher actually sat next to me in the audience until I was ready to join my classmates on the risers half way through the show. By being thrown in front of an audience time after time, whether for a grade or for the sole purpose of torturing me, I can say that I am accepting of my fate—a fate such as giving an elevator speech in front of my fellow Shuckerites one Wednesday afternoon. 

Elevator speeches, just as they sound, are incredibly short personal advertisements highlighting our best traits to prepare us given the rare chance that we are riding an elevator with a CEO or some other high positional executive. Walking into our meeting that fateful Wednesday afternoon, we were told we’d have about twenty minutes to get ideas flowing in our brains and to jot down notes. Our elevator speeches were meant to portray our five top strengths (from a strengths test that we took) without directly saying our traits. Our group was split into two—half of us remained in the Garden Room while the other half was taken into a neighboring classroom.

As butterflies swarmed my insides, I listened in awe to my first few classmates that delivered wonderfully creative speeches with ease and poise and without a stutter or a stammer.  After enough speeches had been spoken, I decided to get mine over with—and while my tongue was flying at a million miles an hour and my heart was pounding uncontrollably—I was able to deliver the speech with minimal hitches. Relieved after my turn was over, I was able to enjoy the rest of my classmates present—in all honesty, we had some performers in the room that sounded perfect as if they had delivered this intricate story embedded with their personal qualities hundreds of times before. While I thoroughly enjoyed the speeches by my peers, I do wish I had been able to watch and listen to the other group in the next room. However, I am so proud of my group for rising to another challenge and, yet again,  proving to be incredibly talented and gifted individuals.