Demonstrate leadership, negotiation, relational, and consensus skills
Starting a new club is both easy and difficult. It is easy, more or less, in the fact that all you have to do is get five people together to be the officers, find an advisor, state your case before Senate, and you will be voted in. You are official. But, especially in the case of a club looking to provide a service to campus, there is much more that goes into its foundations. In Fall 2016, my first semester at Seton Hill, I looked for the Martial Arts Club I was told was on campus to no avail. I decided I would be the one to start it. I had been told that Dr. Atherton was the advisor for the last martial arts club, so I contacted him. He told me to talk to Dr. Burns. Dr. B told me that another student, Erika Totaro, had been looking to start a martial arts club as well, so we joined forces. I recruited some new friends to be officers, and we signed the papers. Following that, we had a series of officer meetings. We discussed whether we wanted students to have to pay a fee to encourage participation or if that would discourage it. We researched martial arts schools in the area and contacted them to learn if they would be willing to work with us on campus and what their fees would be. We created a poll on Facebook to learn what styles of martial arts Seton Hill students were most interested in. We interviewed two instructors and decided on who we wanted to work with. We worked with a graphic design major, Rebecca Scassellati, to create a club logo. In Spring 2017, we were ready to begin offering Tang Soo Do classes on campus and have been doing so since. We currently offer four classes a week taught by student instructors certified by C.S. Kim Karate and one practice class a week for any martial artists. Every semester we also hold belt testing. When instructors are unavailable or the weather is bad, I need to make the decision as to whether we will still hold class. At the end of every semester, we pick new class times for the upcoming one to suit when our instructors are available to teach and when our members are free to come, decided via a poll sent out by email. I schedule and lead all officer meetings and send out emails to club members.
Seton Hill Martial Arts Club (SHMAC)
Film Club
In Fall 2018, I woke up one morning with an idea. For a year at that point, I had been working towards the creation of my Honors Capstone project, which is a short film, so I had learned a lot about filmmaking in preparation for that. I knew of someone on campus, Sonny Bahe, who is a cinematographer. What if... we started a filmmaking club? I sent out an email to him and my The Art of Film class professor, Dr. Arnzen, and the idea started rolling. Dr. Arnzen was unavailable to advise, so I had to contact several professors before finding Adam Pellman. One of the first orders of business for our officers, several filmmakers and acting majors I had procured, was to decide the direction the club would go in. When I conceived of the idea, it was specifically going to focus on filmmaking, but that is such a narrow field. If we wanted to get more members, opening the range to that of film theory (movie watching and analysis) was the better bet. We decided we would try to balance both, having a 48-Hour Filmmaking Festival and some sort of movie night every semester. Our first semester, Spring 2019, we had a basket raffle to try to raise money for film equipment or movie showing rights (which, we researched, are very expensive). The raffle came back with a net of a measly $20 profit, so the club will have to think of some other route to raise money in the future. Film Club meets every other Friday, and each meeting has a lesson taught on some aspect of filmmaking or film theory. We have already had two guest speakers who were not students: Dr. Arnzen talking on mise-en-scene and Will Zavala, ex-professor at the now penniless Pittsburgh Filmmakers, talking on story building in movies. I schedule and lead all officer and club meetings and send out emails to club members. I also directed one short film for the club, "Ultimate Ultimate Frisbee."
Express arguments or main points clearly, in written and oral communication
Written Communication
As an English major, I have had to write many argumentative essays. One that comes to mind is my term paper in my Writing About Literature class, titled "Is Reading All There is to it?: Studying Video Games as a Source of Literature as is Evident in Adam Cadre's 9:05." In this paper, I looked at gender and spirituality as discussed in video games, narrative structure and delivery, and how video games have been used for therapy. One point I made was, "Even 9:05, in which the game is constructed completely out of words, relies on the player to decide the direction of the game and to force it forward every step of the way (9:05). Works like novels and plays have the opportunity to be read without someone else affecting the outcome. Yes, plays and screenplays are meant to be performed, but stage directions can substitute in the missing information, along with the reader’s own imagination. For a video game that requires artists from multiple disciplines, like writers along with voice actors, graphic design artists, and musicians, the script is a small part of what the player experiences" (Betz 4-5).
Oral Communication
In Spring 2017, I took Oral Communication with Dr. Jones. In that class, I delivered a persuasive speech about why everyone should come to Seton Hill University and
consider a Spanish major or minor. I argue that the Spanish major is useful by making any major more marketable and breaking a language barrier and plausible because it is small (only 30 credits for the major, 18 for the minor) (Betz 2017). The speech had an introduction, conclusion, and three major body points. While delivering, I dressed up, was confident, stood up straight, made eye contact with my audience, reviewed the points I had just made, and previewed what I would be talking about next.
