Today: Mar 28, 2024

Vision board helps students create goals

Desteny MaraghReporter

Leadership week on campus offers many different events and opportunities to sharpen students skills in being a leader.

As part of leadership week, the graduate interns in the Office of Student Involvement put together different online activities and events to connect student leaders.

Since COVID-19 is still prevalent, the interns were looking for a way to host an in-person event while abiding by the university’s regulations.

They decided to organize an event dedicated to creating a vision board where students could come and choose from different backgrounds, cut out photos, pick quotes and draw with coloring supplies to help create a board full of potential goals.

“Speak it into existence,” said education TESOL and bilingual education major Chelsey Cerrato, graduate student. The main goal for this program was to document “how you see yourself as a leader in the future and what you aspire to be. The board is a visual representation of what you’d want in life.”

“I wrote on my board ‘accept failure,’ because life’s not it’s always easy and accepting failure is a big part of becoming a successful leader,” said Cerrato.

Cerrato said she hosted an event like this one in the past with the Organization of Latin American Students during her undergrad, so she was familiar with the creative process.

“I personally made one towards my life goals and where I want to be, I’m an Education major so I geared my board towards that,” said Cerrato.

“In order to lead you must be a follower first,” said Cerrato.

“It helps put things in perspective. Like, these are your goals, this is what you need to focus on.”

She said she feels vision boards can be used as a motivational tool and can serve as a daily reminder of long-term aspiration. “I’m going to hang this in my office,” said Cerrato.

Another intern in the Office of Student Involvement who organized the event is student development major Alandre Alexis, graduate student.

“One of the biggest things that pushed us to do this event is to give people a chance to visualize and create what they want to see in themselves and the people around them,” said Alexis.

“They can literally see and touch what they want,” said Alexis.

Alexis spoke about a vision board he made recently for a class which was based on envisioning one’s self 10 years in the future.

He said he began to think expandingly about it.

“What exactly do I want to see,” said Alexis. “I was trying to be very honest with myself. I asked myself, what do I want, what is definitely going to be there, what can I control, what can’t I control. Putting that all on a board, it’s a soothing thing,” said Alexis.

He said he has made several vision boards and each one holds a different message and meaning.

“No matter how many times you do it, it always looks different,” said Alexis. “I can do a vision board again today, and it would be totally different from the one I did last week.”

“That just speaks to the fact that as a person, you’re are always changing. Your dreams, hopes and goals are always changing.”

Another intern who hosted the event is Student Development major Michael Lauer, a graduate student.

“We were looking for something to do in-person that was lowkey and wouldn’t bring a crowd of people because of COVID-19,” said Lauer.

He said that goals are important to have when making the boards.

“To envision was one goal, but another was to connect students to leaders and leadership and what that looks like,” said Lauer.

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