📞 HELO, Secretary Jasmine Speaking

I have never been someone to take the easy road. In addition to pursuing a graduate degree, I've decided to take on student leadership roles too! Higher Education Leadership Organization (HELO) is the Master of Higher Education (MSHE) student organization. HELO puts together events for MSHE students from socials to professional development to mentorship matching!

The Executive Board consists of half Cohort 12 and a half Cohort 13 members. An evenly shared E-board creates opportunities to network, learn from other graduate students who have a year of experience, and grow your collaboration skillset. Initially, when I turned in my application to be a HELO officer, I had applied for a position that required a lot more work and dedication. Outside of MSHE and my professional career, I am the President of a Classified Senate at Orange Coast College. I lead a shared governance constituent group of 300+ Classified Professionals (staff who work on campus that is not administrators or faculty). In higher education, shared governance is sacred, and contributing Classified voices to college decisions is essential. I have a responsibility to my Classified colleagues and being their advocate in high executive arenas.

I had anxiety over the amount of HELO work that I had signed up for and the potential of not giving it 100% of my effort. I had to accept that I am committed to the Classified Senate. After a lot of self-reflection and prioritization of my responsibilities, I had withdrawn my application and chose to reapply as HELO's Secretary instead. HELO officers described the Secretary as the least stressful office position in HELO. They were describing it as managing email correspondences and putting together meeting agendas/minutes. If anyone has worked in an administrative assistant position, you know being the "secretary" is not an easy job whatsoever!

Being HELO Secretary pushes me to utilize every skill I have in leadership, for example:

- Assisting to run efficient meetings with Robert's Rule of Order

- Creating cheat sheets for other officers to understand proper meeting linguistics

- Creating systems to organize Agendas and Meeting Minutes

- Archiving ten years worth of old emails and files

- Creating officer google drive filing systems to ensure the saving of historical documents

- Creating an email correspondence system to ensure all officers receive messages

- UNSUBSCRIBE to a lot of junk email lists

- Managing a public HELO member calendar

- Generate meeting availability invites and scheduling meetings

- Maintain email correspondences with the campus community

- Interacting with each officer to check on their events, email invitations, assessments, and thank you's

Although I chose the easier path of student leadership, it does not take away from my contribution to continue making our student organization better. Like in the Classified Senate, this is shared governance, and all voices are part of the decision making.

Question: What student organizations are you apart of? Let me know in the comment section.