The Coburn Blog

Well, yesterday I graduated from the Leadership Academy. Graduation was held at Anderson University this year.

Link to a much larger photo

Some of those names are hard to read, I understand. President Thomas Snyder is the head of the Leadership Academy for all 13 regions of Ivy Tech throughout the country. Most of the regions are around the Indiana Michgan area, but there were some just outside as well. We had a few guest speakers during the graduation ceremony, but I can’t tell you what all their names were, I forget now. LOL

Anyway it was fun, we drove down to Anderson Indiana from the Ivy Tech Region 2 Warsaw Campus, Friday the 11th, and stayed at the Hampton inn a few miles away from Anderson University.

The first day, we got a chance to take a tour of Anderson University, have a couple nice meals, and then listened to the Anderson University jazz band play until 9pm that night. The jazz band was really good, I wish I had brought a camera with me.

I brought my swim trunks with me to swim in the pool after the jazz band played at 9pm. but Region 2 wanted to get together in room 321 that night to work on our Powerpoint presentation for the next morning. Each of the 13 regions got to do a presentation about what we learned this year in the Leadership Academy. We did that for maybe, 10 minutes, hehe, and then the rest of the time just hung around and talked about silly stuff, ya know how that goes. I basically hung out in room 321 until about 4am when everyone finally went to bed. Half the group went to bed around 11am, some left about midnight, but 4 of us stayed up all night, including myself. They wanted to take me to one of the local bars, and I would have went if they asked, but we ended up not going and just sat around the hotel talking about sily things mostly.

Anyway, we all had to be up and dressed by 7am for our presentations, so I didn’t even bother going to bed that night. I could have slept for maybe a couple hours, but I figured I’d probably oversleep if I did that, so I just stayed up. Almost everybody in the group had their own hotel room, there were a couple guys who got rooms together, and a few girls, but most of us from our region were lucky enough to get our own rooms since not everyone from the Academy completed. Most dropped out after the first semester, or just stopped going to the meetings entirely. I think Jennifer and I were the only two who attended every meeting, so we each had our own room.

The only complaint I really had about the whole trip. I took my laptop with me to help work on the presentation, and I couldn’t connect to the hampton inn’s wireless internet. I worked on it for hours. After fussing and fussing with it, I finally just figured it was a WIndows Vista issue, because everyone else who was running Windows XP had no issues connecting, and I did exactally what they did, so Vista must be the culprit as to why I couldn’t connect, but I have the same problem connecting to the Warsaw Library, and I figure that must be why. Vista won’t connect to any open network, it almost forces you to use WEP or WPA-PSK even though there is an option in Vista to connect anyway when it gives you that warning, but the thing is, even though I have problems connecting to hotels and libraries, I can’t seem to “reproduce” the error here at home, so I’m not real sure how these other places have their routers configured. If I could figure out how to reproduce the issue here at home, I could work on a solution, but I can’t reproduce the issue here at home, so just gave up on it.

The other complaint I had, The hampton Inn where we stayed the night, was like, 2-3 miles away from Anderson University, so we didn’t have the option of working on our presentations in the Computer lab on campus. That made alot of us mad, because we would have rather been able to walk from the campus to the hotel if we wanted to, especially since they had so much more to do at the University. We noticed several other hotels closer to the University they could have put us.

Also, most of the people at this big Regional event, were in the 18-24 age group, and I just don’t fit in with that age group really well, ya know? It was like trying to network with a bunch of little kids, they wanted to go out and party all night in bars and stuff, they just didn’t understand that wasn’t my thing, so most of my peers just ignored me for the most part. I did go along with what everyone else wanted to do, but they still didn’t talk to me much at all. It made me sad to tell you the truth. It always upsets me when I goto these events and nobody talks to me. I know I’m not much of a conversationalist, especially around a bunch of 18-24 year old girls. I mean there were a few guys too, but most of the regions were all women, which is usually the case in colleges around here most of the college attendance seem to be women for some reason, which would normally be fine by me, I like talking to women better then I do men anyway, I always have, but its just the fact that the whole semester they’ve treated me like that. I met a couple people in person who were on my facebook friends list, which was real neat, some from ft wayne and bloomington mostly, but a couple of them took me off their facebook profiles and banned me from their facebook friends list, after seeing me in person with the cane and sunglasses and everything, so that was real upsetting to me, especially since this was supposed to be a graduation conference about leadership. How can a person even begin to be a good leader, if they discriminate against the disabled like that. They didn’t treat the guy in the wheelchair like that, only the blind person. That, downright irritated me to no end, because it wasn’t just my region who acted like that, it was most everyone from all the regions, and that really upset me.