I am a member of a business fraternity on campus called Delta Sigma Pi. We are somewhat different from a social fraternity in that our main goal is to develop members professionally into high performing business people in our selected field. We do this through a number of activities such as mock interview preparation, case studies, and professional events with speakers from company’s etc. I am part of the professional development group within our fraternity. It consists of me and five other brothers in the fraternity. Our goal is to develop and structure any/all professional development events for the fraternity. In order to do this we must come together in many forms and build these events.
Internal representations were all of our past experience in structuring events and also our business knowledge, as well as our connections with people on and off campus to make presentations to the fraternity. External representations included many helpful artifacts. We have a database of past graduated brothers and connections at companies to refer to when looking for presentation speakers on a certain topic. We have guidelines and past power points from other classes/speakers to look upon when creating case studies. There are many resources like this used to reduce our load.
Our overall goal was to take our internal and external representations and transform them into internal representations for the other brothers as they grew professionally. All information we had and also all the external connections we had could be included in information being represented. To do this we would often needed to create a forum for transformation. This could include a power point presentation by one of us on say leadership, ethics, or some other topic. Or we could have used an external representation such as an alumnus to come back from his business to give a speech to the brotherhood or from his business through video chat.
Our tasks are often highly coupled because they are often difficult and non-routine. We often get many different speakers on numerous topics which not all of us know a lot about. We also are uncertain in the way case studies are understood, and how the younger brothers will respond to all the events. It takes experience to get the right mix of events using both internal/external representations.
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ReplyDeleteI think that internal representations count quite a bit (as compared to other posts) in your "cognitive system" The only thing that I see is that most of your representations are transformed in one way - using speeches/presentations. Have you thought of expanding that in order to perhaps be more successful/diverse with the transformation?
ReplyDeleteI would bet that these activities would help a lot in developing people to go out into the real world and face challenges such as interviews, reporting to officials in the company, etc. How often does DSP hold these types of events and does everyone in the fraternity attend them? Keeping events like this tightly coupled would seem to help a lot as it would keep more people involved and interacting during the events.
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