Mountain Pacific Association of Colleges and Employers Conference
I had the pleasure of speaking today at the 2005 Mountain Pacific Association of Colleges and Employers (MPACE) Annual Conference. What a great job the organizers did.
The conference was at the Pointe Hilton Squaw Peak conference center in Phoenix, Arizona. The keynote speaker was Randy Snow, an absolutely brilliant, gifted motivational speaker. I'm not usually one who enjoys these types of speeches because they often come across more as group therapy sessions than anything else, but Randy was really something else. He's been in a wheelchair since the age of 16 as a result of a farming accident but has never let his disability get the better of him. Truly a remarkable person. No excuses for him. So no excuses for us so-called able bodied people.
My presentation was designed to help employers and college career service offices better engage students and recent graduates through their corporate and school career web sites. There were about 50 attendees, so rather a large crowd, and were they ever inquisitive. Question after question. Actually, great question after great question. I knew that I was in for an engaging, energetic hour whena gentleman asked the first of these questions barely two minutes into the presentation. I love when that happens, because it creates dialogue. I better understand the needs and wants of the attendees , as a result, they receive better information.
At the end of the presentation, I was rewarded by MPACE with a gift card to Starbucks (as if I needed any more caffeine at that point) and a copy of the evaluation sheets. There were about 50 evaluations and 49 of them ranged from very positive to glowing. One of them must have been written by a kid whose arm I accidentally (really!) broke when I was in elementary school. Oh well. You can't please all of the people all of the time.
Leave a comment