East Carolinian

Issue date: 11/6/08 Section: Features

Media Credit: staff photo

This weekend, ECU women took a step into the world of leadership.

As part of the ninth annual Women in Leadership Development Conference (WILD), 34 female students and faculty engaged in connecting and networking with other schools across the state. According to the official conference description, the mission of the WILD Conference is to "inspire, develop and empower a diverse community of collegiate women as leaders, striving to do this by teaching relevant skills, creating networking opportunities, recognizing and challenging structural barriers and encouraging self-reflection."

"Making Connections" served as the theme for this year's conference, and intended to show women participants how to make critical connections that are deemed necessary in order to become a leader. These steps include connecting to yourself, others and to the community.

"Many of the workshops talked about how to network with others in order to succeed," said Brooke Barton, a student leadership assistant at the ECU Center for Student Leadership and Civic Engagement. "During lunch, we had the opportunity to network with people across the state, and we discussed our dreams and goals for the future and offered advice to each other about how to get internships, organizations to get involved in and people we knew who could possibly help others accomplish their career goals."

Other workshops focused on how to learn and improve participants' strengths and weaknesses, proper communication and interviewing tips for job and how to deal with conflict management within an organization.

Cheri Britton, an Asheville resident who works at BOOM Thinking, served as the keynote speaker for the conference. Britton offered the women leaders advice about networking and challenged them to write out goals they hoped to accomplish, along with discussing it with others around them to find ways to achieve those goals.

"You can't have what you want if you do it alone," said Britton, whose main focus for the women participants was to show how important proper networking is for emerging leaders and how people must connect in order to reach individual goals.

Britton also shared words of wisdom from Ivan Misner, the founder of Business Network International.

"First, you have to be visible in the community," Britton said. "You have to get out there and connect with people; it's not called net-sitting or net-eating--it is called networking."

For Barton and the rest of the leaders, the opportunity to attend the conference was not only an opportunity to improve individual skills, but also to meet with other women leaders that thrive at ECU.

"Not only did we have the opportunity to meet students from across the state and network with them, but we also had the opportunity to get to know students from ECU," Barton said. "One of the most rewarding parts of the trip was when a non-traditional, commuter student and a current junior stood up on the bus and thanked everyone for making her feel more a part of the ECU community. She said through this trip, she had the opportunity to make several new friends from ECU and feel like she was more at home at ECU."

ECU brought the largest delegation at the conference, complete with PeeDee the Pirate stickers.

"Overall, this conference was a huge success," Barton said.



This writer can be contacted at features@theeastcarolinian.com.

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