Tri-C’s Student Leadership Retreat
On February 24th, Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C) Metropolitan campus held a Student Leadership Retreat. The event was open to all students, no matter what campus they attended. Students were treated to a breakfast buffet consisting of fruits and donuts before the event started. Nache Jones, Interim Director, Student Engagement and Davion Fisher, Advisor, Student Engage organized the event.
The Retreat was presented by Alison Doehring, Director of ZipAssit and Brandon Alexander, Director Learning Communities and Akron Experience. Doehring and Alexander introduced themselves at the beginning of the presentation then spoke about the True Colors program. They also spoke of leadership skills and their correlation to personality, what ties it into color is the test the presenters administered to students.
The test administered was a personality test, the results given being the colors students embodied. The colors presented included gold, blue, orange, and green with each representing strengths and weaknesses associated with them. Doehring and Alexander took turns discussing how different colors can increase individual leadership skills.
Gold represents those who are loyalty driven, organized, embrace tradition, and carry responsibility. Blue represents those who are emotionally driven, social, value sincerity, and compassion. Orange represents students who are impulsive, energetic, risk takers, and charming. Green students were deemed analytical, driven by logic, investigative, and skeptical of everything.
Students were put into groups then instructed to construct a downtown Cleveland monument with assorted objects like plastic cups, paper plates, tape, and balloons. The groups were meant to sort students in a variety of colors, to simulate working with people of differing personalities and strengths.
Students who have learned their strengths and weaknesses are now put to the test, having to work together with others. Some students identified bias with one student concluding that the environment felt very orange and that participants in his group were impulsive and had very strong personalities. The student assigned blue, implied that they presented sensitivity to the more energetic orange personality.
After this activity, students were welcomed to a taco bar before departing to the next activity. The final activities split all the students into lessons in the Metropolitan Business and Administration building where classes consisted of gender awareness in business, disability awareness and minority sensitivity.
The Retreat was a lesson to all the students in attendance on how to embrace their differing personality types. The Retreat also taught students how to work with other people’s personality types, to enhance their strengths and dilute their weaknesses.
Students from all walks of life, or in this case colors, were brought together and taught how to help each other excel. As Doehring and Alexander displayed incredible teamwork while also being powerful leaders as they strived to teach those at the Retreat to do the same.
