SPRINGing Through the Finish Line

Spring 2012 is over—as of May 4^th-- and I can’t say I’ll miss it.

Thanks to: Victoria Michael for being my Program Planning and Evaluation mentor, and Brent Scholar, Scholar Consulting, LLC for being my Leadership Development mentor.

I’m going to be completely honest and say that I didn’t enjoy this semester. At all. I was really stressed and I’m sure that part of it was the fact that, in addition to homework from the other two courses, I had to write my 10-page Graduation Research paper. The one I have to write in order to graduate. It felt like I was taking three classes instead of two and that was a lot of added stress for me. I was also feeling some discontent over my Leadership Development course. Brent had a more “teacher-classroom” approach than I was used to in this program and I felt like I was back in college again, with the points Rubric system for grading and the textbooks he wanted to use because he was familiar with them. I didn’t like that feeling because I didn’t do well in that environment. It felt too strict. I chose Prescott’s program because it encouraged more freedom of expression and his way of teaching was the total opposite, as if it didn’t really fit into the theme of the school. I felt a little stifled, and wanted to use some other leadership books I had discovered, but Brent was adamant about only using the ones he was familiar with. But I could use these other books as resources for all the papers I had to write.

On the whole, I discovered that Prescott’s form of learning is a little unorthodox for people who are not familiar with the school. For people like Brent, who teach online (or in the classroom), the experiential aspect may be outside their comfort zone.  I’ve gotten used to the mentor method of learning because all of my previous mentors do not have the classroom experience that Brent does. This semester has taught me that “mentoring” means different things to different people and everyone will have a different style.  This semester also taught me that I still don’t have a handle on the work/life/school balance thing. I didn’t take too much time for myself and when I tried, school managed to squeeze its way back in. I had to forfeit 2 assignments from my LD course and one from my PP&E course due to lack of time. I felt guilty about that for about a day before I realized that the beauty of this program is the flexibility (I wouldn’t have been able to do this at a typical 4-year university). The important thing is that I got what I needed to out of these courses. I also learned that I see myself as having more leadership potential now than I did when I first started the class.

A little over a week later and I’m just now feeling the tension slip away. I was pretty tense throughout this semester and didn’t realize how much so until I received my final grades (B+ for LD and an A for PP&E) and a bone-deep exhaustion settled over me a few days after that. I have roughly 3 ½ weeks before my final semester starts (May 31^st) and I plan to enjoy the break as much as possible. It’s flying by so quickly….