An Overview of LTI Closing Ceremony 2009:

On May 10, 2009 LTI had its annual closing ceremony, with the featured event being the student’s presentations on their final projects. However, before the students presented on their projects, family, friends and LTI staff first got acquainted with one another over lunch at the Stata Center. Additionally, alumni from last year's LTI program also participated in the ceremony.

After lunch, the presentations took place in room 123 of the Stata center. Each student had about ten minutes to present their service project to the entire LTI community. The projects presented on included: helping immigrants learn English, removing graffiti, improving communication between parents and teens, increasing bottle recycling, raising alcohol awareness, and helping to raise awareness of poverty stricken children in Uganda. While each student used their projects to tackle challenging problems, what struck me was how practical each project was. Each student showed how he or she could achieve their goals either by improving already existing programs (such as Invisible children for the raising of awareness of poverty stricken children in Rwanda), or by asking for small donations (under $500). Additionally, I was also impressed by how quickly the students planned on completing their projects. For example, the student who wanted to create a play to raise alcohol awareness was well on his way to completing his goal. Already he has written out the script of the play, talked with the drama teacher of the school, set a date for the play to take place, and now he is helping to caste the actors.

In addition to the presentations, another event featured was a brief reflection by the mentors. This reflection included the mentors presenting each student with a certificate and making a brief speech that acknowledged how much each of the students had grown over the year.

LTI Closing Ceremony 2009:

All family and friends, faculty, LTI community and past alumni are welcome to attend the final LTI gathering of the 2009 Spring Session!

Leadership Training Institute Closing Ceremony
Sunday May 10th
12:00 noon to 2:00 pm
MIT Room 32-123

The importance of letting others lead:

This week's session of LTI highlighted a not too known part of leadership. This week's session showed the importance of being a good follower.

One featured event of this session was an activity in trust. In this activity, the students were blindfolded and led across a maze by some of the mentors. After the activity, the students returned and had a brief discussion on why leadership was important. While people made it clear that leadership was important in order to make sure that things got done, the question was brought up whether bad leadership was better than no leadership. In my opinion, the group came to a good conclusion when they decided that bad leadership was better than no leadership, because bad leadership eventually leads to changes, which ultimately leads to good leadership.

In addition to discussing the importance of leadership, the students also listed qualities of leaders by examining the leaders that impact their lives on a daily basis (such as parents, teachers, and coaches). While I was impressed that the students stated that one characteristic of being a leader is to motivate people, I was blown away when the group made the discovery that good leaders also have to be good followers.

Finally, after the discussion, the students used the rest of the time to prepare for their final project presentations for the Closing Ceremony.