Great Lakes Regional Conference Review

The Great Lakes Regional Conference was last weekend up at Purdue. What a great time! Kevin Lampe might be one of the most fantastic brothers of Phi Kap that I have ever met. I mean he has passion and vision like I've never experienced before. I had the privilege of hanging out with him much of Friday which was great fun. It's exciting just to be around him and hear his stories - personal, professional, and fraternal.

Saturday started off with a Keynote and alumni development programming from Kevin. It's great to watch the guys watch him because you can see the respect. They are so engaged in what he's saying. Then I did a track of recruitment training. It's so hard to do recruitment training because I only had 50 minutes and I could talk for hours about recruitment. We covered just the basics - NIC 5 Step Model, how to have a conversation, how to meet people, tips on non-verbal communication, etc. I love teaching guys to take things out of context. I feel like they get it. It's boring to hear people talk about "Fraternity" for hours so I always love using analogies or making them think outside of "Fraternity." We talked about how recruitment is like dating. Love that. Next was lunch. A Purdue brother owns this great place in West Lafayette and that's where we got food from. We had hot dogs (which I normally think are gross but these were actually really good) and fries. It was nice to have down time and meet some new guys.
After lunch was Accreditation. It's factual and boring for the guys but I sure am excited for it! That program is my baby! We (me, Rob, WPI, Ben DeLost, Brett Breir, Dan Bureau) put so much time and energy into that thing. I can't wait to see how successful it is. After that we had more recruitment training. This time it was a role play activity to help the guys learn how to troubleshoot difficult questions in conversation. This is one of my favorite activities to do with a group of people. I used to do this with the girls all the time but doing it with guys is even better because they're not fake. The last activity for the day was watching the movie "Miracle" and small group activities.

Saturday night. Where to begin? To be honest the outcome of this evening was disappointing. I did not attend, however the chapter was aware that the evening social function was to be alcohol-free. It was not. In addition to drinking, items were stolen from the Purdue chapter house. I am shocked that brothers would disrespect me by drinking and disrespect the Purdue brothers by stealing. It's a shame really. I hope we don't have the same issues at the Midwest event this weekend.