On Friday November 2nd, the UMSL Ambassadors attended their mandatory monthly meeting. Last month, Camila highlighted the ambassadors’ monthly meeting, and now we have the chance to hear from Shyanne about the skills she gained and the excitement she had knowing she could take something away from the meeting.
The meeting began with guest speaker Sarah Benkendorf from UMSL Counseling Services. She led a presentation based around the idea of effective communication and how it could be used to relay an individual’s needs or wants; or at least to allow them to be acknowledged by whomever they are speaking to. This ability is so important when it comes to building healthy relationships as there are circumstances where we may need to negotiate or discuss matters with civility, and having good communication skills will benefit all parties involved.
Sarah also discussed the idea of lying to ourselves as a mechanism to alter the way we feel and behave during conversation, such as “I will be so upset if he/she says no to me.” In reality, we must understand that not every person in our life right now will be in our life forever, so giving others that power is not beneficial to us. To end it, we were led into a short meditation session to help ease our minds of the stresses we feel in our day to day.
Before we transitioned into the final session of the meeting, we played some games. The first game should sound familiar since we played it at the last meeting; we partnered with someone we didn’t know and taught them something new. I taught Awa about the four different tissue types that are found in the body. She then taught me what “chunking” was and how it can be done with worms. The process is as easy as it sounds: you take a chunk from one plate that already contains worms and move them to a different plate that has E.coli and it’ll grow.
We then broke out into our three committees (social media, research, and media/blog) to play two more games. The first game we played was a campus map game. Each group got a map of North and South Campus, and we had to remember as much as we could in three minutes. My group split up the campuses, so half of us looked at South Campus and the other half looked at North Campus. Once the three minutes were up, we were given blank versions of the maps to fill in from memory. Knowing UMSL’s campus is helpful as ambassadors because we need to be able to efficiently direct people around our campus.
In the last part of our meeting, we played a second game in our groups which tested our ability to remember faces; but not just anyone’s face. We learned about individuals we may interact with on more than one occasion, such as the deans of each college, executive events staff, etc. We again had to remember as many people on the list as we could in three minutes. My team utilized the same strategy used previously of splitting up into halves. After three minutes went by, we were again given a blank version of the list and had to fill in as many names as we could from memory. Overall, the meeting was informational and enjoyable as always. I definitely walked away knowing more faces than before.
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