Skills USA leadership

I was chosen to represent my school at the Fall Leadership Conference for Skills USA Nevada this weekend. I usually enjoy attending these conferences. They're a lot of fun. I get to meet new people, get some helpful information on how to be a better leader. But this year's conference felt like a mess.

One issue I had with the conference was how they decided to run workshops. These workshops split the large group into many smaller groups and offer short lessons on things like how to effectively run social media for a group, or even how to give better directions. However, instead of signing up for workshops ahead of time, you simply showed up at a workshop. This posed a problem, considering there were 300 of us. Each workshop had a limited amount of people that could attend, and once capacity was met, you were out of luck. That left a few people wandering around, trying to find a workshop when many of them were already full. We were never even given descriptions on what these sessions were about. We simply had to pick based off of the Disney song title that each session was given (the theme for the week was Disney. Leaders land, disneyland, get it?). I have an issue with this because as this is a conference intended to make us better leaders in our Skills Chapters and in our communities, I think that I should be able to attend the workshop that would most benefit me. It felt as though they treated these sessions as a time filler that just needed to be accomplished rather than something helpful that they were offering us. This was particularly frustrating, considering that they did take up a considerable amount of time, and it was entirely possible to get stuck in a boring session that didn't apply to you.

In years past this conference had been well organized and overall helpful to me as a leader. This year really fell short of the bar for me. It was disappointing, considering that it was the last one I would be able to attend. I hope that in future years they can get themselves together, because I truly believe that this kind of event can be a great benefit to students.