Jason Austin's Blog Life and times of a PHP Developer in Raleigh, NC

Pathways Graduation 2009

If you follow my blog, you may know that I have been in a leadership development class for the last year.  The course has about 15 workshop days where you study leadership principles and strategies.  We also have to be the "leader" for a project, and be on a team of other members in our class for a "team project".

The class is  a lot of work...more than I had thought it would be.  And the most challenging part was that all of our assignments were sort of grouped together at the end.  This made the last month+ pretty stressful.

Last week, we had our final workshop, which was a day of presentations (both individual and group).  My individual presentation was about my work with the NCSU Web Developers, and I think the presentation went off pretty well.  I was told that I was the only one who ever quoted Vanilla Ice in a presentation, so I was proud   Here are my slides if anyone is interested:

After the presentation day was over, we had a graduation ceremony.  We had 37 people graduate the program, which was a pretty big class.  Along with my "diploma", I also won an award for "Inspiring a Shared Vision" for the work with my project.  That made me feel pretty good.

The class as a whole was a learning experience.  Going in, I thought I knew everything there was to know about leadership, but I learned alot of valuable tools along the way.  Assuming you have the time and can work it into your schedule, doing Pathways at NC State is beneficial.  I would just warn anyone that it is time intensive.