First Programming!

Okay so yesterday I had my first ever programming, which I'm still not sure how to adequately define. But yesterday morning was uneventful because I do not work on Mondays so I just slept in and then did some laundry before lunch. After lunch Tina, Abi, AJ, and I left to head to our programming which was meeting at a company called City Year. It's about 45 minutes away from our place with a few Metro stops in between. And we did get a little turned around walking there, but since we were so early it didn't really matter.

We got there and sat down to hear Sam Neely a young woman who works at City Year tell us what it is all about. It actually sounds like a pretty cool program. Basically it has a corps of individuals who then lead, mentor and tutor at risk students in different communities in the United States. The program offers a living stipend which is based on which location you work at. And the program itself runs for the whole school year 10 months. It seems like a really rewarding program, one I might immerse myself in following graduation, who knows?

After her talk about City Year we learned about different leadership styles. She referred to it as the leadership compass. North - Action, South - Empathy, East - Vision, West - Analysis. We then divided up into the four groups and everyone chose which direction they believed best embodied their leadership style. Mine....North. We then discussed the positives and negatives of our group, and what ways other groups could work better with us. After this the groups counted off in numbers from 1-4. Then Sam told us to move to the direction we believed we were the weakest in. I of course moved to the South. We then discussed how we could work to become better leaders in these areas. After this the numbers from earlier grouped together. Each group was then given the task to build a tower. There were restraints though. North people could not touch anything. East people could not see anything. West people could not say anything. And people from the South could to anything. Honestly I hated not being able to touch anything, but it did teach me some things. I noticed that I paid a lot more attention to everyone in the group. Especially the West people because they could not talk so I helped to convey their messages. I also tried to keep the East people involved by telling them what was going on. Our group did not win the tower building exercise because we ran out of time. 30 more seconds and we would have had our last support in, but oh well. I did take away some new ideas about leadership from that. And then we were released to go explore Dupont Circle if we wanted or just to return home to the RAF (which most of us did, to get some food and possibly a nap).