Adventures in Pittsburgh Part 2

Anita and I are on our 6th day and decided we would finish our Pittsburgh adventures in a Part 2 blog.

After the Mideast Regional Conference finished, we stayed to work on a strategic plan with the Pennsylvania Mu Chapter at the University of Pittsburgh. When trying to decide what to write about we were happy to compare our experience with our own embarrassing story from this morning.

We woke up this morning and spent some time sitting in bed, catching up on work e-mail. Out of nowhere Anita screams bloody murder and jumps on to my bed, which in turn has me screaming right along with her (I was unsure what else I was supposed to do!) At that point I see what she has been screaming about. We have a giant, radioactive grasshopper climbing down the side of the bed. The two of us being the girls that we are, are huddled on my bed, screaming and unsure of how to handle this. Every time I gather a little courage to go find him, I get scared and run back to our home base. Finally Anita forgoes our pride and calls the front desk to ask for assistance where they send someone up to help. He is unable to find it but offers his assistance if we manage to find it and kill it. At this point we realize we must go shower and get ready for the day regardless of this bully of a grasshopper and sure enough as soon as I stand up, he lands at my foot. After this 25 minute debacle, Anita is finally able to trap him with her Phi Kappa Theta binder and we manage to get our fantastic helper up here to dispose of him. Even though we both were terrified, we both afterwards felt fantastic to have taken care of him ourselves after all.

As we started to write these blogs, this story gave us an opportunity to reflect on the process of strategic planning and how the similar challenges we find when working with chapters toward change. We started out this story feeling scared, it was easier for us to huddle in a corner screaming, than face the challenge of killing this deadly jumper. We occasionally got bouts of courage only to revert back to our huddle. At some point we realized we just couldn't do it and we reached out for help, but ultimately after this, it was still left in our hands and we managed to come out victorious.

University of Pittsburgh is one of many chapters that have been placed on Chapter Colony status this year and that has afforded us the opportunity to work with them a little more closely than in the past. The chapter, like many, are scared of what might happen (just as we were scared of our bug). They also were able to realize that they can't do it all on their own, swallowed their pride and have reached out to us as staff and are working to reach out alums in the area, as well as campus professionals for assistance. Just like in our story we see bouts of courage and motivation in the chapter. They see this as an opportunity to better themselves and make a stronger chapter. When we as staff see that, it is exciting and the chapter is dynamic to work with. However ultimately what I hope for them and for all of our chapters is that they continue with the courage and not revert back to what is easy and what they know. We have heard a lot about traditions this weekend and while traditions are important we hope that traditions aren't holding them back from the growth they are capable of. We feel confident that if they don't hold back, they too will come out feeling victorious.