All photos courtesy of Heather Mitchell
This past July, both the Student Recruitment and Advising team, as well as a few of the Enrolment Service Advisors, participated in staff retreats. If you’ve ever met the Student Recruitment and Advising team (SRA), you’d know that we don’t mess around when it comes to planning events—especially staff retreats.
This particular retreat was hosted by SRA for the SRA/ES recruitment team, and we were fortunate enough to be joined by several of our Vancouver Enrolment Services (ES) colleagues, who will be travelling and helping out with recruiting in the fall.
The goal of the retreat was to increase everyone’s advising knowledge and presentation skills before we begin travelling and recruiting across Canada. But instead of the usual workshops and speakers, we took an innovative approach to learning and relied on Kahoot quizzes. This was a fun and engaging way for the team to test their knowledge of different subjects, learn some new things, and compete for bragging rights (and a gift card). In the end, Maureen from the Enrolment Services team took the top prize for having the highest score across all three days and fourteen different quizzes! Way to go Maureen!
But there’s no shame in losing either (I’m looking at you, everyone who is not Maureen). As I discovered early on with these quizzes, “the more you lose, the more you learn”. #Deep
In between the sessions and many quizzes, we found a new way to cool down in the Okanagan heat. I’ll give you a hint. It looks like a balloon and it’s full of water…
That’s right! We had our very own water balloon “fight”. I wouldn’t necessarily call it a fight because it was more similar to a game of pass the wobbly, water-filled hot potato. Nonetheless, it was tons of fun! Unfortunately, there are no photos, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.
On our last night together, the team went for dinner at BNA, a local favourite here in Kelowna. They’ve got food, drinks, shuffle board, bocce, and even bowling!
A few weeks later, more of our colleagues from Vancouver came to the Okanagan campus for a second retreat.
While the first one would be hard to top, we certainly did our best to keep things fun and informative. We introduced them to some of our colleagues in Housing, Engineering, Management, and some of our friendliest (and furriest) colleagues on campus, the UBC BARK dogs.
On the last day, we had a wonderful and informative tour of the new Innovation Centre in downtown Kelowna, followed by lunch at the Perch Café.
Overall, I think both retreats were a big success and everyone enjoyed themselves (even if they don’t want to admit it). Thank you again to Lauren Hatchard and Tony Harris for all of your hard work and planning!
I’m already scheming for our next retreat, which is going to be even bigger and better. If you have any fun ideas our next retreat, please submit them to hilary.finch@ubc.ca
Wish us luck as we head out onto the road to start recruiting the next cohort of UBC students!