ISLE: Iowa State Leadership Experience

ISLE was once again a great experience! I always love the energy that is present as such experiences here at Iowa State. The guest speaker Delatorro McNeal was great! He showed so much passion for his job as a speaker and also a leader. I envy how much energy and excitement that he was able to express. He made a lot of good points throughout his presentation about what a leader should and shouldn't do. It really hit home when he said to lead others, you must first lead yourself. I think this is very important to remember when thinking about how to be an effective leader. I also really enjoyed how he broke down the movie clips to demonstrate different leadership styles. I had never thought about looking at a movie this way. We can observe different leadership styles all the time, but I never thought of them being in the movies. After his presentation, I thought a lot about my role as a leader and which style that I prefer to use.
For the second session, I went to Mike Gaul’s presentation on interviews. This was a great session that talked about all of the dos and don’ts of interviewing. I think these sessions are always very beneficial because you can never learn enough about this subject. I feel that sometimes interviewing is just common sense, but there are some great tips that can be followed. I thought the information that he shared about the end of an interview was the most interesting. He told us that you should always have questions to ask at the end and also ask for the job. I was aware that you were supposed to have questions for them, but not the part about asking for the job. He means that we should be so confident in our closing statements that we are basically asking for the job. He said that being confidence and strong is what companies are looking for. It is also interesting to hear the horror stories of bad interviews. These also are entertaining and make you think, what were they thinking. Overall, I thought that ISLE was a great experience this year and that we are lucky to have such a great conference here at Iowa State.


Have a great weekend everyone!