Week 1 (and a half)

This is officially my first blog ever! I'm finally getting organized and back into the swing of things. I'm excited for UST 311 and am looking forward to getting to know the other mentors better. It will be fun to have an outside of class social event soon.

The first week of class was very similar to other classes, go over the syllabus and assignments. It was nice to have a very complete syllabus that laid out the entire semester and all the course requirements. Having a complete syllabus really helps to get my calendar in line. I'm excited to see that events such as the Iowa State Leadership Experience (ISLE), the Learning Community Mini Institute and ISCORE are required so that I will make sure to get to them. All of these event should be interesting and a learning experience.

The book for the class, The Peer Mentor Companion, is an easy read and I have enjoyed it so far. Chapter one was a good introduction and I appreciated the self evaluation section. Although I have been an Agricultural Business Peer Mentor for the last two years I still feel like I have plenty to learn not only about mentoring, but also about myself and my leadership style as well. The self evaluation from pages 9-12 helped me to realize what my strongest areas were and then also what my areas for improvement are. I am very confident in my abilities to communicate, utilize campus resources, working with diversity and evaluation my mentoring. My weakest area, according to the evaluation surprised me, it was self awareness. I consider myself to be pretty self aware so I then looked at the sub questions. I see that there are a lot of terms that seem to go along with understanding self awareness. Since this is my weakest area I am glad to see the I will be a discussion leader for that chapter with Jenna. That should help me to learn a lot more about the topic.

All in all, I am excited to be in UST 311 and will now be reading for class tomorrow!

Cheers!
Lisa