Guest speakers, comedians, and artists made the 2009 California Community College Student Affairs Association conference in Sacramento a great experience for the Associated Students Organization (ASO) and the Inter-Club Council (ICC).
Vice president of ICC, Chris Pham, said that more than 500 students attended the conference.
” There were so many students from all across California and the atmosphere there gave me this incredible feeling, because they are the most powerful people on all of the campuses,” Pham said.
Pham also said that it was not just the workshops that taught him but just meeting all the different people that attended.
Ana Safazada, president of ICC said that there was an entire Double Tree Hotel, which was reserved for the conference.
” We had a lot of different things going on. The whole conference consisted of workshops, breakfasts, lunches, and dinners with entertainment,” Safazada said.
Safazada said that there were many inspirational speakers who came out to inspire students to become better leaders.
“All the workshops were directed and targeted towards student leaders to help them out with any of their weaknesses or the problems that students face now,” Safazada said.
Safazada said that there were different workshops that were available and that they had the option of choosing whichever one they thought would benefit them the most.
“I attended two workshops. One was tinkering with teamwork, which a lot of my ICC members attended with me,” Safazada said. “I thought this was really important because we all need to learn to work together.”
Safazada said that she did one exercise where the class was separated into groups and then had to build a structure in a limited amount of time.
” It really pushed us to not only work with people that we had just met but also to listen to others. It forced us to use our listening skills and helped us to realize that working together is the only way to establish a goal,” Safazada said.
Safazada said that another workshop that she attended was event planning.
” I thought this was really important because ICC’s main focus is planning events on campus. It really helped us out with key points that we need to know and keep in mind when planning events, like time, location, and budget,” Safazada said.
Safazada said that the conference was helpful and that it was also fun.
” This was an amazing conference. It was nothing like I expected. I thought it would just be boring and strict and only educational, but they actually made education more fun,” Safazada said.
Safazada added that she learned a lot from the CCCSAA conference and that she hopes to bring all the things that she had learned back to EC to become a better leader.
“I highly recommend for the future generations to attend these conferences and I hope that in the future we can have a larger budget so that we could send more people. I think this would be a great benefit for our school,” Safazada said.