Essay Contest Continues to Excel

On Saturday, December 4, SIFE held its semi-annual Ethics Essay Contest Awards Presentation. Approximately 30 students, parents, and guests attended the ceremony; and that number included PA State Representative Fred Keller. Representative Keller pro-vided the prompts for this year's contest, a fact which was not known by the winners and their families until the day of the ceremony. Mr. Keller addressed the audience with a few remarks and congratu-lated the students for their talent and inspiration. Also attending the ceremony was alum Megan Neff, who was the project leader for the Essay Contest for two years. Under Megan's leadership and her team's initiative, the responses increased from fewer than a dozen to more than several hundred. This year we had 317 essays submitted, sponsored by 15 teachers -- a GREAT turnout. In an effort to "go green" and reduce our impact on the environment, all essay contest materials were available online on the SIFE website. This new method worked out great, and we will continue to use it in the future. We are looking forward to the spring contest and hope to keep this contest growing each year.

Recap of Our Meeting With Prudential

The Students In Free Enterprise Executive Board met with Katherine Comock from Prudential on October 27. This was a very productive meeting on both ends. From our SIFE team’s standpoint, we were able to establish a potentially long-lasting relationship with a Fortune 500 company that has plenty of insight and experience to offer us. We hope to take advantage of this in our mission to integrate and expand our projects. Both our SIFE team and Prudential have a great characteristic in common: sustainability. Learning from our Prudential partnership, we hope to strengthen the sustainability of our projects and team each year. From Prudential's end, they have opened a gateway into an outstanding academic institution to promote their company and recruit at the same time! Again, this was an incredibly productive hour that left both ends excited about the future!

Recap of Our Training Conference

On October 16, a few members of the SIFE Executive Board, as well as some of the project leaders, went to Loyola University in Baltimore, Maryland, for a SIFE training conference. Throughout the day, we learned of various leadership skills that we could bring back to Susquehanna University for effective team productivity. We were first introduced with the topic of innovation and learned that helping people see opportunities for innovation in both breakthrough leaps and continuous improvement can generate new ways of thinking. We also learned about how to lead a strong team and were reminded that being a leader of a team requires the ability to capitalize on a wide range of personalities, skills, and abilities. Another topic of the session included supportive and directive coaching approaches which help to achieve and maintain performance standards. The conference then gave us an overview of the SIFE model as a guide to developing a vision and mission statement, developing goals and objectives, developing projects, and focusing on team and program sustainability. The conference ended with a discussion of the new criterion and covered the development and implementation of a SIFE project from the brainstorming process to measuring the outcomes of the project. The final session detailed the special competitions, such as Campbell’s Let’s Can Hunger and Sam’s Club Environmental Sustainability Challenge. SU SIFE has already submitted proposals for both grants.

SU SIFE Named Regional Champs

On Friday, March 26, 2010, SU SIFE competed in our 7th Annual Regional Competition in New York, NY. Our presentation team did a wonderful job and we were once again named Regional Champs. Thank you to everyone who made this year a success and we are looking forward to Nationals in May in Minneapolis, MN!

Open House

On Saturday, March 20, 2010, SU SIFE will be hosting our annual open house at 2pm in Apfelbaum Hall in Room 319. We would like to invite you to come to campus to see our SIFE team's presentation. This will be our dress rehearsal in order to get ready for our Regional Competitioni n NYC. We would love to have as many people as possible come to see our presentation and to enjoy all of the work we have done so far this year!

Regional Presenters

Rehearsals for this year's regional competition in NYC are in full swing! The competition site is the Hilton Hotel, and the competition will be held on March 26. A large team following will support the presenters on that day. Presenters include Dylan Antonacci, Robin Carey, Matt Custer, Kellie Nebiker, Lacey Lamanna, and Bob Ryan. The video specialist is Sarah Andrews, who is currently coordingating the script text with a flow of images, video clips, and informational slides. The theme of this year's presentation is "SIFE: The Susquehanna Way."