College of Chapters '07

[Kevin]

Who went? How was your experience? Tell us about it.

[KyleMcGuire1983]

Originally Posted by Kevin

Who went? How was your experience? Tell us about it.

STICKY! I'll be back to report on this when I wake up in the morning. Basically it rocked minus the sweltering heat, lack of late night snack places, and one crappy bar in the whole damn town.

[SNUIGC]

I was a fortunate member who got to attend College of Chapters. Ummm...to be perfectly honest... it was totally awesome.

First of all, I take offense to Kyle's saying one crappy bar in the whole town...there were three crappy bars in the whole damn town...and they didn't have jager....and wouldn't sever any bombs (irish car bomb, jager bomb, etc) The rooms there at Washington&Lee don't have A/C... nor fans in the rooms, so, basically it was friggin hot (which, coming from a guy who lives in MS is saying alot). ...also, got in that Friday and Saturday morning waking up...they didn't have the hot water heaters on yet, so a nice cold shower.

...those were the bad parts, now for the good stuff... we were busy pretty much the whole day...although there weren't any official breaks, there was just so much information to cram in. For me, my personal chapter we got broken off into (Wells) was awesome and our larger one (Zeta) was good... another guy in my Wells chapter and I won first place in designing a recruitment calendar, which was awesome.

Basically...it was awesome seeing HQ, the rose garden, etc. and all this stuff you hear about with the history...heck, I'd LOVE to be an intern there, it's be awesome. The guys were great, just hanging out, meeting guys, just chilling. The information sessions were great, especially for me coming from a Colony... man, there was so much to learn about everything. Basically....it was friggin fantastic and I wish more people could've been there and it had been maybe a day longer.

[TrevorG]

I had a great time at CoC. A decent amount of the classroom style training was your typical useless Tony Robbins style crap, and I learned the most when my facilitator stopped teaching from the book and let us all talk about the various problems our chapters had and how other delegates had approached the same problems. I took away hundreds of little ideas on how to improve my chapter just from talking to other delegates about how they run things.

The Riley University simulation was intense. We were all formed into over 20 different "chapters" around a fictional campus, given chapter histories (all were different), elected officers, and then had to deal with scenarios that actually happened to real chapters. It ended up being pretty stressful, as the simulators really piled on the problems to the point that it was ridiculous. I was on the Judicial Committee for my chapter, and we were unable to function because both the EC and LC were absent while meeting with simulated Nationals officers, school officials, ect. Technically, I was ineligible to do anything anyways because I had been accused of forcing pledges to do the Elephant Walk, so I would have been suspended. Later, our entire pledge class (played by other delegates) decided to drop shirt because we ignored them while in a meeting about how to handle allegations of statutory rape. It was quite an interesting experience.

As Recruitment Chair, I got alot of of the "Recruitment Challenge", where we had to draw up a detailed recruitment plan for the year using hypothetical chapter information given to us. This proved very difficult to do in only an hour, but I learned alot from the other three guys on my team. I also helped draw up the recruitment plan for my Riley University chapter.

[Kevin]

Trevor, if you can, in one of the rush threads, please let us know what you learned about recruitment from those other chapters. I know a lot of other chapters read these boards for ideas, so anything can help.