The Bradley Organizational Leadership Training seminar returned for its second year but with a twist: it was mandatory.
Club leaders were required to attend the BOLT seminar Aug. 25 or they would be unable to formally register their club organization.
“Last year we piloted BOLT and only around 60 organizations attended,” Director of Student Activities Tom Coy said. “From those 60 organizations we saw their levels of functioning and efficiency and understanding of the university’s operations to be dramatically higher than the organizations that did not attend, so we decided to make it mandatory.”
Over 200 organizations participated in this year’s BOLT, according to Coy.
“Student organizations receiving funding from the university need to be good caretakers of that money, and that’s another reason it was made a mandatory part of the registration process,” Coy said.
BOLT covered policy changes, catering services, room reservation and other information pertinent to student organizations. The Student Activities Budget Review Committee and Tech Crew also presented to the students.
After the presentations, the student leaders were divided into breakout sessions dealing with topics like resume building and leadership transitioning.
This year’s BOLT seminar was not met without criticism.
“I was disappointed and felt a little misled by the title,” Samantha Strom, president of the National Novel Writing Club, said. “When it said ‘leadership training,’ I thought it might give me an interesting perspective or give me a strategy to keep my club engaged but it wasn’t training, it was just an information session.”
Strom’s complaints weren’t limited to the program’s name.
“Most of the information we learned was something that any competent president or someone who’s ever been on an executive board would know or know how to find out,“ Strom, senior public relations major, said. “It really only would have been helpful for a new president or a new group.”
Strom was not alone in her complaints.
“I thought the breakout sessions were sort of interesting but too short to be of any real value,” Lydia Strubhar, president of Writehouse, Ink and editor-in-chief of Broadside, said.
Strubhar wasn’t entirely critical of the program.
“I think the whole thing was pointless for clubs that don’t have student funding, like Writehouse, and that a lot of the information could have been sent via email,” Strubhar said. “But as the new editor-in-chief for Broadside, which is funded by SABRC, I found it really helpful.”
According to the survey distributed at the end of the event, a majority of the respondents thought BOLT was average or above average.
