I want a 3.0 for this blog

So this week, we are asked to blog about the strengths and weaknesses of our chapters, our councils, and finally, of our community.

In some ways, it's hard for me to answer what is the strongest aspect of my chapter because by being on PHA, by going to retreats and conferences, and by constantly talking about what changes need to be made, I feel that I sometime overlook what we do already have. I have so many new perceptions on what COULD be, instead of focusing on what is a strength already and how that doesn't necessarily need to change. My involvement in PHA and learning so much at these conferences and other events has shifted my thinking to "What is our strength, and how can we make it stronger? "

With that said, I do believe that the sisterhood at my chapter is a strong point. We may not all agree with eachother on every single topic, we may not always respect eachothers' differences in thoughts, but at the end of the day, if any of my sisters needed anything, we would all come a running. I am proud that my chapter has a strong foundation with sisterhood and understands that we are part of an organization bigger than ourselves. Afterall, what can really be accomplished and remain purposeful and successful if we cannot love and respect eachother with differences set aside at the end of the day?

I believe that my chapter's weaknessess fall under the categories of academics and community involvement. We have strong women in our chapter who achieve high grades and consistently give back to the community, but we also have women that forget the real reason why we are at Ohio State. Academics and education should be our first priority for being at OSU, but it is often farther down on the list. I will be the first to say that with my involvement in other activities, it is schoolwork that often falls last on my list, no matter how many times I remind myself that the process should be reversed. I also think that we can strive to make improvements with our community. As a whole, we could have such a stronger presence, but it appears to be the same women who are involved in everything. I am not overlooking those dedicated women in my chapter who do try to participate in community service activities and to get involved in other organizations, but as I re learned at AFLV, " you chapter is only as strong as your weakest member."

I believe that a strength of my council is that we all share the common belief of building relationships with eachother first, work second. It is impossible to make great strides for our community if we don't understand and respect eachother for their individuality and hard work first. We are all busy busy women, but at the end of the day, I believe that we are all officers of PHA for the right reasons. We all want to make great changes as a PHA council collectively and most importantly, believe in ourselves and eachother to do so.



We are all one big happy snuggie family!

A weakeness of our council is miscommunication. I don't think necessarily amongst the 5 of us, but with us and the rest of the Greek community. It's difficult that we are all on one page, while the rest of the community seems to be on another, and we sometimes may forget this concept. Even though we try to keep the delegates involved, I think we sometimes don't explain things to the fullest extent or really explain the purpose behind everything we want to do. It is difficult to get everyone on board with our new ideas if communication is somewhat of an issue. Then, the miscommunication also falls with the chapter presidents and other officers not getting into contact with us, the delegates not taking the information back to their chapters, people not being held accountable for returning emails, etc, etc. I know we are going to run into these types of issues when working with such a large amount of people, but it is something that we can all work with the presidents, delegates, other positions, and ourselves to improve upon.

A strength of our community? I think this one is easy- there are 3000 of us who are all Greek, the largest collective organization on campus who have such POTENTIAL to make a difference in our community and beyond. We have so many resources available to us that no other organization has-- campus leaders who believe in Greeks, the New Union and its resources, alumnae, and other student organzations who want to pair with the Greeks in order to create an ever bigger impact in and outside of our community. We have the strength in numbers working in our favor, and all we need to do is figure out how to really use this to our advantage.




A weakness that I see within our Greek community is the other half of having so much strength in numbers-- the collectiveness of the Greeks. We all know we are Greek, but we do not always treat eachother like we have this amazing commonality. We do not always associate with people from other chapters. We tend to stick with what we know and who we know. We do not always recognize the potential that we have as such a large group. Even though our four exec councils are starting to become a collective group, we only have so much impact because we are only a small portion of the entire Greek Community.

I'm glad that I was forced to think about these concepts..it's such an easy, natural task to think about everything we need to change and everyone's minds that we need to change. We are so focused on making changes that we do need to stop and recognize those people who are doing a great job in their positions and who are being positive role models in our community...those are the people who are helping us make the changes that we want to see.

OATH

To me, I think an oath is a sacred promise that is held to higher standards than just your normal promise..







It's a promise to yourself and others how you pledge to live and lead a certain lifestyle...
It's a promise that you will work to help others and find ways to benefit people other than yourself..
It's a promise that you are dedicated to the people around you that took the same oath that you will hold eachother accountables for the certain values that you share.
It's a promise to reach out to others to help them realize their potential, to provide them with opportunities, and to help them in grow which in turn will allow you to grow as a person.

To me, it's not so much about what each organization's oath consists of. Chances are they all have some meaning of dedication, respect, education, helping others, etc, all the aspects that allow an organization to grow and be successful. I think what's more important is how an individual who swore to an oath is carrying out what they repeated..

I think that the Greek community often overlooks the importance of the oath they took. This could be because it is not emphasized after the Initiation process, only reviewed when something goes wrong that calls for a review, or people have other intentions of joining Greek life and know that by taking the oath, they are now part of the Greek community.

We obviously know that within the Greek community, there are many issues that should not exist if people simply understood the oath they took for themselves and put effort into living these values each and every day. As we learned at AFLV, the first step for us to be able to make a change is to live out our values through our actions and words. Afterall, We can't preach what we don't practice.

My favorite AFLV memories!

So I'll get to all this important/inspirational stuff that I learned later, but I just wanted to blog about all my favorite stuff of the trip after reading julie's blog! I had so much fun...and here's why:

1. Minglesticks and Mingle BBM Group
2. Coming up with all the holidays--and dedicating them to Zack and Ina (Ina does not smell) haha
3. Quality time spent in my SNuggie with Sam
4. Green Beans
5. Hot Sauce x2
6. Step Show with side entertainment provided by Ben Hubener
7. Awkward boyfriend waiter and awkward baby momma comments
8. Tyler's Birthday Surprise
9. Meeting the other Big Ten Schools..but we are clearly the best and most fun
10. Pictionary + Ben/Zac/Blake's crazy dance moves
11. Secret/Weird Roomate + Kayla Talks
12. Step Show
13. Eating too much Swedish fish and Chex Mix
14. Bus Ride!!
15. And of course, hanging out with everyone and getting to know all of you while we ate chicken!!


I had so much fun on this trip and I'm really excited to keep getting to know everyone! We need a reunion soon!!

PHA

So instead of holding our PHA exec meeting tonight, we decided to blog about our values so that we could have some extra time to prep for St. Louis!

So, what are my values? I know that I already wrote about this in another blog, but my number one value is my family. I wouldn't be here without them, and I wouldn't be anywhere today without their support. Friendships are equally important to me because I feel like no matter how much success you may find, it means nothing if you can't share it with the people you love. It is also fair to say I value my education since school is my top priority, and I know that I will be successful someday because of the hard work I put into nursing school. Not suprisingly, I think that why nursing is such a fit for me is because of what the field entails...it's a profession dedicated to servicing others with knowledge, maintaining high standards of practice, respecting each and every persons' differences and learning from them, and using a collaborative effort to treat the patient. Ironically, these values, and many of my own values are also embodied in the Panhellenic Creed.

PHA values...

Scholarship, friendship, service, maintaining high standards, health, diversity,strive to live,and community.

One of the goals this year is to help unify the Exec board, directors, and delegates. Afterall, there shouldn't be a separation because we are all here for PHA and for the betterment of our community, but somehow this always seems to happen. So, we are striving to maintain our commmunity by working together and breaking down the barriers by getting to know eachother.

Diversity is another aspect that PHA strives to live by..this could mean learning to get to know eachother and respecting differences, reaching out to the other three councils, embracing our differences, reaching out to the community, and most importantly, just opening our eyes to what else is really out there.

Strive to live...I think that this in itself is just saying to live life to the fullest ,take the opportunities that come your way, and don't take anything for granted. Although I never classified this as one of my values, this is something that is really important to me because I wouldn't be seeking leadership opportunities if I wasn't striving to live.

I also believe that the core of PHA's success will come from the two values of friendship and community. Forming friendships and bonds with all sorts of people helps build up our community and allows us to see past our own views to actually see and appreicate others' differences. By having a strong community, there is the upmost potential to help service others, support eachother in school, keep eachother accountable to maintain high standards..and through all of this, we will have proven to ourselves how one can "strive to live."

ritual is what?

I typed in ritual in my google search, and here's the first good thing I saw from wikipedia:

"A ritual is a set of actions, performed mainly for their symbolic value, which is prescribed by a religion or by the traditions of a community. The term usually excludes actions which are arbitrarily chosen by the performers, or dictated purely by logic, chance, necessity, etc.

A ritual may be performed on specific occasions, or at the discretion of individuals or communities. It may be performed by a single individual, by a group, or by the entire community; in arbitrary places, or in places especially reserved for it; either in public, in private, or before specific people. A ritual may be restricted to a certain subset of the community, and may enable or underscore the passage between religious or social states.

The purposes of rituals are varied; with religious obligations or ideals, satisfaction of spiritual or emotional needs of the practitioners, strengthening of social bonds, social and moral education, demonstration of respect or submission, stating one's affiliation, obtaining social acceptance or approval for some event — or, sometimes, just for the pleasure of the ritual itself."

I'd say that's a pretty well rounded definition of what a ritual can be, what it stands for, and what it can be. But what are my own thoughts about ritual?

I'd have to say that I'm still a little bit confused/ don't fully understand exactly what ritual means to me yet. I know what we do for each ceremony, I know the words that we say, I know what we teach our new members, but I don't think I have a strong personal meaning for myself. During class last week, I was talking to Rian about her chapter's rituals, and it was pretty amazing to me how strong their bonds and ritual were amongst the entire group of women. To her, having a Ritual Chair was unheard of and would never be the case in her chapter (or so that's what I believe from our conversation). This concept is huge to me...we have one "Ritual chair" who is supposed to "teach" us the meaning and lead the ceremonies. However, I'm not sure we can actually be taught the meaning of ritual...I think it's a concept that we gradually understand and through experiences, we develop our own meaning of what living the ritual is. And, it's not to say that I don't strive to serve others, to better myself, to get an education, or to work hard because I think that I do try my best in these areas. I think that much of these come from my own personal aspirations and being surrounded by women of the same determination. But, I do not think that my Ritual is the top reason for why I find these aspects of life important.

Even though I don't know exactly what I'm looking for or exactly what I should understand about Ritual, I think that I will come to find my own understanding in the next 52 weeks. And with that, I will do my best to pass on what I know to the new members and show my understanding through my actions.

Greek Week

I am going to blog about Greek Week 2010, because for the past 1.5 weeks and for many future weeks to come, I'm sure my life will be consumed by nothing more than Greek Week, Nathan McCullough, and Marco. The three of us held about 40 interviews in 2.5 days, selected our exec board, and have a retreat planned all in about one week's worth of time. ahhh!! This past week has been really crazy and its hard to start focusing on greek week when in the past we haven't done much with it until much later, but I am more excited about what's to come than with how stressed I am. We have a great group of people with lots of new and fresh ideas...and this better be one heck of a Greek Week if Nathan and I are putting so much time into it! By the way, anyone have any great awareness topics they think would be fitting for this year's GW???

Haiti Benefit Dinner

I just wanted to post a quick blog about the Haiti Benefit dinner last night. I talked a little bit with my house mom, Rosie, and she told me about how much hard work and collaboration went into planning such a big event in just 6 days. It's great that we are at a university with the resources and people available to do such a thing. I helped with serving rolls..woo hoo! Haha...actually there is a picture of me in the Lantern rocking my hairnet and getting my roll on :)

One of the best things I saw all night (aside from the runners bringing us more pasta because we kept running out) was at 5:30 pm. It was so awesome to see so many Greeks take over the RPAC and come support this cause. I got really excited when I saw my entire chapter show up but was just excited to look around and see how many different chapters were represented.

Today in my nursing class, I talked to one of the girls that is VP of the Red Cross Organization at OSU. She commented on how amazing it was to see all the Greeks come out to support and had no idea that there were so many of us.

Anyways, thanks so much to everyone that put in so much effort to hold the benefit (especially Zack!) and whoever else helped..you guys did such a great job!!!!