Get Excited!!!

So it’s been a while since I’ve done an update on Life After D.o.G. Street, my seminar series, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been working on it!  When I last posted we had a list of potential speakers and nothing solidified for our first seminar which will be on September 24th.  Yikes!  Well since then, a lot of progress has been made.  I have continued working with Professor Busbee in the business school, and touched base with Cindy Gillman in the Alumni Association.  Ms. Gillman has been helping me with a speaker for our seminar on credit.  Through her contacts at Bank of America, she was able to find a speaker who is trained in speaking about credit and money management to college students!  Perfect!  The only obstacle we faced then, was that they prefer to speak to groups of 100 or more and I wanted to keep the seminar small.  In the end, however, we got the details hammered out, and the seminar got one step closer to becoming a reality!

The big issue from there was marketing.  I needed to get news of this seminar out to the students and quickly.  I started by posting flyers around campus, but those yielded a great big zero people asking to come to the seminar.  The next thing I considered was doing a mailing to all of the seniors’ mailboxes.  In the age of “going green,” however, this seemed like a huge waste of paper.  So I kept brainstorming…I put the event on Facebook, thought about using Student Happenings, but I needed something more direct.  In the end, I got in touch with our class president, and he agreed to send out an e-mail for me to the senior class about Life After D.o.G. Street.  The results were better than I could ever have hoped for!  I now have 60 people signed up to come to the first seminar (10 of whom are on a waiting list, because I just couldn’t accommodate more than 50)!!  60 people!!  There was something about actually seeing the student response that made this come to life for me.  It’s still hard for me to believe that something I thought up at the beginning of the summer is actually happening, and I did it!  The best thing is that I didn’t have to do it alone.  I couldn’t have done it alone.  I needed the help of faculty, staff, and students alike to get this thing going.  I think I have now generated enough interest that I will be able to fill the seminars for the rest of the semester.  I don’t want to jinx myself, though.  Maybe I should bake cookies for the first seminar…food is the way to the heart of any college student.  Cookies might get them there and keep them there.  That’s not bribery is it?  🙂