AMPED 2013 (late, don't feel like editing, excuse all errors)
This weekend I got to be a part of the AMPED (Action Minded People Empowered to Dream) conference put on by the Residence Life staff for the first year students living in residence. I was one of the group leaders. I was really looking forward to it but I've still been feeling incredibly overwhelmed by my workload. It sucked losing an entire Friday and Saturday but I did get a lot out of it.
The keynote speaker was one of my University's Economics Professors, Larry Smith. His talk was incredibly informative and enjoyable. He's actually quite popular at our University and his TEDxTalk has over 1 million YouTube views. He talked for about an hour and was very eloquent with his story-telling, but the gist of it was that a lot of people will come to university with dreams and aspirations yet will leave beaten down. People think that in order to be successful we need to work like dogs for long hours and do whatever we're told. People will just accept that working terrible hours is just the way that things are and that that is how you work your way up. People end up settling for careers they hate. Larry Smith talked abut former students he had that he would run into years down the road. Some of them loved what they did and some of them he could tell just ended up settling. He said he liked to do something called a "smile test". If when someone was talking about their career they smiled, he would know that they were happy with their lives. If they didn't smile when they talked about their career, he could tell that they did not enjoy what they were doing.
It's important to have a life when you're older. It's important to have time for yourself and to have time to spend with other people. He told of stories of former students who would spend all day working and were too mentally exhausted by the time they got home to spend time with their family. Many of them would end up getting a divorce. He said that people that are "stars" don't have to work like dogs and can get many benefits. People that are stars are people that can ask a lot of questions and can think of problems that nobody else has thought of. These types of people become invaluable to a company and a company will fight to keep a star with them. The example he gave us was the problem that Google had with the booming popularity of smartphones. Smartphones have smaller screens and thus advertisements do not show up as well. Google makes a lot of money off advertisements. The person who was able to identify that problem before anybody else would be somebody that Google would want with them for a long time. I hope I can take the advice he gave us and apply it in the future.
There were a lot of other informative and fun activities after that. I of course fell even more behind on my studying and completing my assignments on time, but in the end I say it was worth it. I don't think I would've had an opportunity like this again.
The keynote speaker was one of my University's Economics Professors, Larry Smith. His talk was incredibly informative and enjoyable. He's actually quite popular at our University and his TEDxTalk has over 1 million YouTube views. He talked for about an hour and was very eloquent with his story-telling, but the gist of it was that a lot of people will come to university with dreams and aspirations yet will leave beaten down. People think that in order to be successful we need to work like dogs for long hours and do whatever we're told. People will just accept that working terrible hours is just the way that things are and that that is how you work your way up. People end up settling for careers they hate. Larry Smith talked abut former students he had that he would run into years down the road. Some of them loved what they did and some of them he could tell just ended up settling. He said he liked to do something called a "smile test". If when someone was talking about their career they smiled, he would know that they were happy with their lives. If they didn't smile when they talked about their career, he could tell that they did not enjoy what they were doing.
It's important to have a life when you're older. It's important to have time for yourself and to have time to spend with other people. He told of stories of former students who would spend all day working and were too mentally exhausted by the time they got home to spend time with their family. Many of them would end up getting a divorce. He said that people that are "stars" don't have to work like dogs and can get many benefits. People that are stars are people that can ask a lot of questions and can think of problems that nobody else has thought of. These types of people become invaluable to a company and a company will fight to keep a star with them. The example he gave us was the problem that Google had with the booming popularity of smartphones. Smartphones have smaller screens and thus advertisements do not show up as well. Google makes a lot of money off advertisements. The person who was able to identify that problem before anybody else would be somebody that Google would want with them for a long time. I hope I can take the advice he gave us and apply it in the future.
There were a lot of other informative and fun activities after that. I of course fell even more behind on my studying and completing my assignments on time, but in the end I say it was worth it. I don't think I would've had an opportunity like this again.