“Have you ever been told you can’t do something?” was the question speaker Paul Artale posed to an auditorium full of graduate students. Artale was one of two keynote speakers at Saturday’s Graduate Student Leadership Institute.
The event was put on by Graduate Student Life and Wellness, the Council of Graduate Students and Ph.D. Career Services and lasted almost eight hours, starting at 8 a.m. in Brody Hall’s Engagement Center. The institute was designed to teach leadership and resilience, skills that organizers said are sometimes lacking in graduate students.
The working definition of resiliency was “the ability to effectively adapt and sustain during career and life transitions,” according to the event program.
Starting with a short introduction, the two keynote speakers went on. First Lisa Laughman , who is a counselor in the MSU Employee Assistance Program and spoke about emotional wellness. The point of her presentation was “to share with you the emotional wellness skills that are essential to effective leadership.”
Paul Artale, a Michigan-based keynote speaker, then walked into the auditorium, quickly addressing the elephant in the room. Due to a birth defect, his arms are stunted and he has fewer fingers than normal.
He talked about some important things in his life, like playing football despite his condition and how he learned to ask for help.
“When you look like me, you think you have to be (Superman)”, he said.
He then posed three questions to the audience for each graduate student to ask themselves before moving forward in life. The questions dealt with being prepared for conflict, to have a vision of the future and to address who would help get one to their goals.
He wanted to stress that each student should have an aim for where they were going and to make decisions based off the image of what they want their lives to look like, and later tied that into the overarching theme of resiliency.
“If you don’t know where you’re going, you don’t know what you have to be resilient to,” he said.
This was followed by a question and answer session, then by several more workshop-like activities including breakout sessions covering a number of topics and a review of the StrengthsFinder assessment.
Last in the day was a student leader panel, with four graduate students at MSU who were asked questions by the quickly-dwindling audience of what being a leader meant. They also stressed for the graduate students to try and make connections in their fields at their time of graduation.
“A good leader has to also be a good follower,” said Ashlee Barnes, who sits on the Steering Committee for the Alliance of Graduate Education and the Professoriate and was on the panel. “Before you can lead something you have to understand it.”
