With LATC graduation now less than a week away, I have officially wrapped up my activity schedule for the semester. I tried a lot of new things this last Spring, and it was actually a very busy last couple of months, so it’ll be nice to have things slow down for a little while.

Activities this year were a lot better than last year, and it probably has a lot to do with the fact that we didn’t have to worry about covid quite as much this go around, but I like to think I offered some better activities as well. Intramurals have always been one of the more popular activities, and I was able to offer three more sports this year. It made for a lot of late nights, but the students really enjoyed it, and for many of them, we were able to get a staff team put together as well which helped break it up a little bit.

Even attending the NACA conference last month gave me a lot of ideas to try and it will be interesting to see how year 3 compares to 1 and 2.

The last activity I put on this semester was an end of the year concert cook out event on Friday evening. I had a group of students suggest we do something at the end of the semester as a “one last hurrah” before graduation, and this is what we decided on. It took over two months to get all the details put into place, and was easily the activity I spent the most time and effort on this year. There was a lot more that went into putting this on than I had originally thought there would be!

And since it took so much work, I was stressing pretty hard about it. I was worried I would forget something, or something would go wrong, or my greatest fear was that I would put in all this work and no one would come. Well, the day came, Friday was the LONGEST day ever as I waited for go time, but we finally got there. Including myself, there were about 9 staff members who volunteered to help me put this on, and we got everything out where it needed to be and ready to go half an hour before the “doors opened.” Everything was looking good.

And while I wouldn’t say it was a total failure, it did not have the turn out I was hoping for. There are 2,000 some students at LATC, and I was hoping to have a full parking lot out there dancing and enjoying food and free entertainment. What I got was about 35 students who eventually started getting up and dancing, but a lot of them came and got free food and then left right away. And while the few of them that did stay the whole time said they had a really good time and were glad we put this on, I couldn’t help but feel very disappointed.

With the amount of work that went into this activity, I was really hoping it would have been my best attended event yet, and I was pretty hard on myself when it didn’t turn out the way I wanted it to. Not going to lie, I even seriously considered quitting!! That’s how upset I was.

But my coworkers who helped me put the event on last night, all told me that the students who did come were the ones who really needed something like this, and even though it wasn’t attended as well as I had wanted it to be, I did a really good thing for those particular students. Even when I talked to Dan about it afterward, he said now that I have one under my belt, I’ll know what to do differently next year. I have an entire year to brainstorm new ways to make this event even more successful. And if it’s anything like how every single activity my first year went, it’ll get better the next time I do it. So, here’s to hoping it’ll be better next year!

Anyway, I say all this because sometimes things don’t go the way you want them to. Sometimes, you really do feel like quitting. But if you care enough about it, you got to keep trying until you find that secret ingredient of making it a success. Is student activities my dream job? Heck no. But I care enough about doing a good job and giving the students something fun to do, that I’m not going to half ass my efforts. I also have this annoying trait where I feel the need to prove to not only others, but to myself as well, that I can do better. If it doesn’t go well the first time, then by golly I will make darn sure it goes better the next time. Even if I die trying!

So, if any of you find yourselves in a similar boat, where maybe a big project at work, a race of some kind, or maybe just a personal goal of yours didn’t go the way you planned it would, don’t quit! Keep trying. It may take several tries, but if you give it your all, things often have a way of working out.

Until next time! 🙂

Megan Reiffenberger