what do hip hop, Broadway and the Heldrich all have in common?

What do hip hop, Broadway and the Heldrich all have in common? Well in some way shape or form they have found their way into our unique intensive training weeks for the different parts of our staff. We know what the OLs will be up to, but what about grads, leadership team and PCs? Find out with a look at some highlights below.

• Grad training is very much an orientation to the department of student life and a lot of networking and meeting the people that make orientation happen. Our grads will essentially learn the orientation program through interviewing the partners that contribute to it. They will also do a true colors workshop to get them up to speed with the rest of the staff that had true colors at retreat. Lastly they doing two pretty cool trainings that essentially "fell into our lap" as they were scheduled during grad training week. They will attend a social justice workshop called "hip hop pedagogy" with a well known author and speaker on social justice and the hip hop culture/community. In addition, they will attend a "presenting with video/multimedia" presentation through our HR department at RU.

• Leadership team comes the following week to join up with the graduate staff. This week is very much about building a cohesive leadership unit to lead our staff through the summer. Their training week will include a lot of projects they will work on to prep for the OL intensive training week. In addition they have two special experiential trainings. Since NSO is a lot like putting on a Broadway show, and they are a lot like the stage crew and directors of the Broadway show…we’re heading to Broadway! Our leadership team and grads will go to the Wicked rehearsal space to spend some time with stage crew and actors from the show. They will learn the ins and outs of logistically putting on a Broadway show. There next stop in NYC is a backstage tour of radio city music hall. Then (thanks to our friends at RU-TV) we were able to set up a back stage tour of NBC studios and Q&A with some crew members with NBC. We’ll finish the day with a “Top of the Rock” tour, which is a tour of the top of the Rockefeller center observatory. In addition to our stint in the big apple, this team will head to St. Peters Hospital for a half day behind the scenes look at the ER. This will give some perspective to making quick decisions under pressure and how to manage crisis.

· PC Training is probably one of the most unique types of trainings we do. The PC’s also have one of the most unique jobs with us for the summer. Not many other orientation offices at other universities hire student team members to manage the office and logistics like our PCs. This week will be chalked full of learning all the different rosters, checklists and name tag protocol that we have to prep for each session. In addition, it is important to equip our PCs with an extra dose of “customer service” training so they are comfortable handling just about any phone call they get. We have a special guest, the current front office manager at the Heldrich, which will be coming in to do a customer service/phone etiquette training with our PCs.