Continue reading »]]> Anticipation and Excitement was high last week as our orientation leaders prepared for their first session to lead transfer students. Their final training was on Tuesday and they went through a basic walk-through of what their first session would be like on Friday. We tried something new this year when it came to putting together bags for our transfer students. Instead of having all 33 of our orientation leaders come together to stuff these bags, we decided to divide the orientation leaders into three groups and have one group per session stuff bags. This seemed to work great as a smaller group of our leaders got to spend an hour together and better get to know one another. Also different this year was how we did our pre-session briefing that takes place the day before the session. In the past, we have found a time that fit all of our orientation leader’s schedules, but this year we decided to have two separate briefings to better serve our leaders’ time. Most of the leaders came to briefing at 3:30 where we went over the schedule for the day,who would be leading our concurrent sessions, the leaders’ duties for the entire day, as well as reviewing some guidelines for the day. The rest of our orientation leaders came in at 6:30 and went over all of the same points and all 33 of our leaders left very excited about the day to come!

Continue reading »]]> With selections behind us, SOS has entered into a very exciting time, Spring Training. The first training session just introduced our new Orientation Leaders to each other as well as introduced them to our training program. One of the elements of our training program is the Four FISH Principles which we will be explaining in more detail over the coming weeks. The first of these FISH principles is Choose Your Attitude. To illustrate how this principle is essential to the success of an Orientation Leader, we had the new Leaders lead each other around campus on a mock tour. During this tour, other members of the group had an assigned situation that would challenge the tour leaders’ attitudes as well as creating some fun in training. This showed them the importance of choosing our attitudes in an SOS day and how their attitudes can affect their groups. The other big parts of training involve testing our leaders on their knowledge of Auburn for their tours and for leading their small group times during the SOS day. For the latter, we divide them in a small group and rotate them between SOS Coordinators every week so that they can see the information presented in four different styles. Our hope in this is that they will see there isn’t one way to do a small group session and that they will incorporate bits and pieces of all of ours as well as bits of their personality in order to create their own unique style. Next week, Clair will be here to write about her FISH principle, Play.