Meeting Topic: Elections
Moderator Name: Austin Aragon
Speaker Name: SWC Student Officers
Other business or activities at the meeting: We have announced to our members that we are having elections at the next meeting. There are opportunities to run for Chair, Vice Chair, and Treasurer. Furthermore, we discussed ideas for our summer meetings such as going on tours and going to the LA Chapter meetings as a group. We have also informed our members to let us know if they would want a specific guest speaker to visit the section. We ended the meeting with an exercise that was focused on helping students how to network with professionals, vendors, or people in the industry itself.
Meeting Location: Southwestern College
Prior to our first meeting of the semester, our current Chair, Vice Chair, and Treasurer became interims to their positions.
We are now holding official elections for all three positions in order to give our members a fair opportunity to participate as an officer. We will have those that are interested to give a speech on May 18th and the anonymous votes from the members will decide the outcome.
Since our school semester is ending, we will only meet once a month over the summer as opposed to our usual bi-monthly schedule. We hope to visit all of the LA Chapter meetings this summer, along with tentative tours in LA with either recording studios or film studios. In addition, we also would like to attend the annual Del Mar Fair or the beach as a meeting. We will continue to have our usual meeting routine first before any recreational activity and we hope to achieve familiarity among each other in a more casual setting.
After meeting our guest speakers Mr. David Scheirman, our regional Vice President, and Mr. Ken Freeman, an audio professional, the officers and I realized that one thing we all could benefit and improve on as students are our people skills. When it came to the Q/A portion of our guest speakers' meeting, a majority of our student members were timid. Therefore, we planned an exercise during this meeting to help our members improve by splitting into groups and each group guided by an officer.
We had scenarios where our officers portrayed venders/professionals in an audio convention and the goal for the students was to either receive contact information or to give out their own. Our members learned a lot from this, as officers we paid close attention to: eye contact, body language, having an objective before approaching, knowing how to "seal the deal", and knowing what kind of appropriate verbal communication to use. We plan to have more exercises like these in the future so that we may improve our networking skills and professionalism.
Written By: Austin Aragon
