Engineers are expected to be leaders. They are leaders in science and technology, leaders in innovation and creation; leaders in change. But how does an engineer uncertain in his or her leadership skills find a way to become a better leader? Here are some unconventional programs available through UW-Madison to do just that.
Two students celebrate their victoryduring an ALPs workshop.
Photo Credit: Marc EgelandIn 1995, the Adventure Learning Programs (ALPs) was founded by a group of students who decided that there was a need for experiential education on campus—that is, the idea that people learn more effectively by doing. Abby Dare, student co-coordinator for ALPs and a senior in Physical and Health Education, gives their mission statement, “ALPs facilitates experiential activities that explore group potential in an environment that is physically and emotionally stable, challenging and relevant to individuals, their groups and the human experience.”
Nowadays, ALPs hosts leadership workshops and takes people to both high and low ropes courses in order to help teams, student orgs and even just groups of friends improve their communication and teamwork skills. All of these workshops are free, and any student is eligible to utilize ALPs’s services for their program or organization.
“Groups will come to us saying, ‘We have a hard time communicating with each other,’” Dare says – so ALPs will tailor a workshop to improve communication. “It’s not all about breaking the ice and going crazy and playing these dumb games – there is a point to it,” she says, and says that ALPs is there to create a safe and honest working space for these groups to dig deeper into their problems as opposed to just skating the surface. Dare says, “It’s hard to do, but it’s definitely something that we strive for.”
The workshops ALPs offers run from simple “get- to-know-you” activities to “very intense, very time-consuming, very frustrating” activities, Dare says, they are meant to get groups to really break themselves down and show their true colors. For example, the low ropes course has a wall without ladders or ropes that a team needs to cross. The team has to figure out how to help each other across the wall, which can get very intense, but really helps the team grow as a group.
There are also silly ice-breakers, where the point is simply to laugh and set a positive tone for the day. The workshops run all year, although groups generally don’t go on the ropes courses when there is snow on the ground, in which case ALPs runs plenty of ground workshops. ALPs owns its own low ropes course on the west side of town, and rents a high ropes course on the east side of town, and will conduct ground workshops wherever a group wants to be. ALPs doesn’t have a facility of its own, so often facilitators will bring the props necessary for ground workshops to a chosen location, like sorority houses, Bascom Hill and dorm halls.
Like any student organization, ALPs is more than what students see in public. It also has several committees, such as external relations, internal relations, program development and staff training. Everyone works together in teams, whether it be on marketing, hiring, or staff training. Every team has a team leader, and these leaders meet to discuss how ALPs as a group is doing and how to make it a better organization. There are also two coordinators, including Dare, who work to keep communication between the groups and make sure everything is running smoothly. There are also trained facilitators who run the workshops that students are familiar with. ALPs is not an open membership; you would have to apply to join the group, but no worries, as ALPs hires 15-20 new people every fall.
Members of the Young Progressives participate in a low ropescourse put on by ALPs, which offers its services to all registered student organizations.
Photo Credit: Marc EgelandAnother group on campus offering leadership opportunities is the Accenture Leadership Center. The ALC was founded 25 years ago to give students a place to work together toward better leadership. With the motto, “Learn. Practice. Lead.” their goal is to help students become better leaders, and the ALC has a variety of ways to do just that. The biggest program they support is LeaderShape, the leadership boot camp, from the Leadership Institute. At Leadershape, every day has a very strict theme, and all the activities build off of those themes. Sometimes students do these activities as large groups, sometimes they split off into “family clusters” to go more in depth on how to improve their leadership skills. On the idea of family clusters, “That’s kind of your private time,” Allie Putterman, junior in Marketing and International Business and long-time ALC worker says, “when you’re in those communities it’s really a way for you to open up, to explore your thoughts, to talk with everyone else, sometimes it gets emotional, you don’t necessarily know what’s going to come out of it.” But there are also fun, down-time activities, and attendees will spend one day at a ropes course. “As the time goes on, you get more and more focused … It’s a great way to collaborate and find interests with other people,” Putterman says.
The ALC mirrors LeaderShape’s six ALC themes: Leadership Styles and Personal Effectiveness, Creating a Vision and Bringing it to Reality, The Dynamics of Power and Influence, Building High Performance Teams, Living and Leading with Integrity and Managing Change. These themes are a continuation of what students learned from LeaderShape, and the ALC has a speaker come in to address one theme a month, which means three speakers come each semester. Some past speakers have been retired Accenture partners, the new Dean of the Business School and Bo Ryan. The ALC tries to bring in a lot of different speakers and outside business people so students can really get a scope of what it is to be a leader in an actual organization.
The ALC also does Leadership Case Competitions. For these competitions, a company will give the teams an issue or a problem scenario going on within the company, and the team has to come up with a case of how they as leaders would solve this problem. The ALC hosts one in the first week of December every year (this year it will be December 3rd), where 12 teams of only UW-Madison students participate, and the winner of the UW-Madison competition goes on to the Big Ten Case Competition.
Students can also get a Leadership Certificate through the ALC. It goes on leadership and involvement records, and is the same as getting the campus-wide Leadership Certificate. To earn a Leadership Certificate, attendance LeaderShape is a requirement, along with an MHR Leadership Development Class, which is a follow-up of LeaderShape where students come up with a vision as a group and make their vision a reality. Volunteer hours are also required, as well as four workshop events or two workshops and a Case Competition.
So if engineering students need a little boost to get their inner leaders out, want to meet other leaders on campus, or just have a good time, any of these programs would be happy to bring their leadership to a whole new level.