By Sandy Beltran, Tricoci University at Glendale Heights
At the Glendale Heights location, our admission coordinator took it upon herself to start encouraging new friendships throughout our campus. This consisted of organizing a bowling extravaganza at Brunswick where all students and staff were eligible to come and play. We were all split up into teams and were able to compete with each other to see who could bowl the highest score. The teams were created with new students, senior students, night students, esthetic students, and each team had a teacher whom really wanted to beat the other teachers. I personally enjoyed this because it was one of the first times we were really able to see our teachers outside of their teaching boxes and as individuals and it helped begin our new life-long friendships with them. This also allowed the new students in addition to night students, to get to know some of the senior students and to overall get to know those familiar faces better than they would during their lunch break and occasional passes in the hallways. While bowling, we were able to laugh with each other and encourage each other to bowl some strikes to put our teams ahead of those other teams who were currently in the lead. After we completed our first games, we had pizza and pop and watched the other students’ current scores. With our hungry stomachs full we began to play again and the competition really came underway.
During our morning assembly the next day after our bowling outing, we were informed of the top three team scores in addition to our top three students highest bowling scores. You could definitely see the anticipation throughout the room when students learned who received the highest scores and which students were only few points shy of winning the first place title.
As a student, I had a lot of fun getting to know my peers, making new friendships, and learning more about my teaching staff and general manager. I hope that our campus can continue to participate in these team building activities and I am glad that I was able to attend this event because I now have been able to form tighter bonds with my peers as well as forming new bonds with students that I probably wouldn’t have had the opportunity to get to know without our bowling event.
So I ask you again….. Bowling anyone??