Yazmin Mickens

I attended the last in person NAMI event and received some helpful tips with dealking with my mental health struggles and dealing with school, work and home life.

1. Use the resources you have in your community
2. Be patient with yourself and show yourself grace
3. Be ok with changing and evolving overtime, not everyone will be ok with the "new" you
4. Its ok to say "NO" to family when they have a different path for you
5. At times our culture demands more from us, its ok to build our own path
6. PGCC have groups like Strive to help us always reach out (you can't get help if you don't ask)

Some of the key points that I gathered from this mini session that were valuable to me were:

Use a clean, professional layout
Tailor your resume to the job posting
Highlight your most relevant experiences first
Include relevant keywords and phrases to the job posting
Don’t use colorful back rounds and flashy designs

This is my second SGA meeting since I enrolled at PGCC. There were reminders about academic support & study resources, such as:
1. Note taking
2. Using professors office hours wisely to address issues
4. Have a structured study plan

We were also reminded to apply for the Maryland Delegate Scholarship program. There was also a reminder to take the student survey. This survey help address any issues, resources or teaching strategies that we would prefer/experience in the classroom.

Pointers about GivePulse mini session:

1. Only 2 sessions required but you can choose which one you would like to attend

2. You need to add your 15 impact hours each semester

3. A lot of events are not PGCC events, but GivePulse will promote it.

4. Don’t wait until the last minute to submit your service hours

5. Do not use WIERD names for your email.

6. You cannot use hours from previous semester to count for the current semester

Being that I am a Culinary major, this Fireside Chat was my favorite. There were key points that I took note of during this chat:

1. Food is more than a product. It is culture, community, and business.
2. You will need to be able to talk to people and network in order to build relationships in the industry. It is a very big industry, and you don't know who knows who.
3. Your behavior at your employer should demonstrate to your managers you’re somebody they should pay attention to in a good way.
4. Customer service is very important in the food industry.
5. Expo and host is the most important positions in the restaurant industry.
6. It’s not about what you say. It’s how you make someone feel when giving out good customer service.
6. You need to decide what's more important to you in this industry, do you want to be happy doing what you do or is making money more important. I need to know the difference.

I am in the Culinary business and decided to join this event to get additional information on business media and communications and picked up on the following points:

1. Sometimes you have to take risks in life to get where you want to go
2. You want to always speak up for yourself and always tell the truth when speaking
3. When it comes down to your business learn how to take criticism and do not focus on the negative
4. You want to keep up to date with the latest trends in your industry and all the new technology
5. Use every opportunity to network it will be you get feedback from your industry, business plan, marketing and events related to your business
6. When networking you can do so in person, you can't network on social media

This event made me aware pf the various clubs across campus. The club that I took most interest in (although all were very interesting) was NAMI (National Alliance for Mental Illness). I have an extremely busy schedule with work, school and religious meetings that I attend but I want to try to make the club meetings once a month. Also learned that this year's bookfair will be in April (possibly 24th) and I plan to attend with my mom. There will be several authors present.

There was a lot to reflect on this event. This event truly opened my eyes to a huge problem we have in our community. We learned so I will only list a couple of points that stuck with me the most:

- Sex trafficking is not a foreign county problem. It is a U.S. problem. Other countries only account for 7% of human trafficking.
- Three different types of human sex trafficking: 1) Sexual Exploitation 2) Forced Labor 3) Illegal Order (selling of human organs)
- Human sex trafficking is the 2nd largest criminal enterprise in the U.S.
- 720,000 pictures of children/adults are uploaded daily for the purpose of human sex trafficking
- In Montgomery County there is adult trafficking of 60+ older people in the Asian community due to gambling debt

There were two important reminders that I took from this event. Having a learning disability at times can go two ways, either you are going to ask for help all the time to make sure you are doing things right or you don't want to ask for help because you want to feel like you can do it on your own. For me, it can go both ways. It all depends what type of day it is for me. So, this event reminded me not to 1) have pride and ask for help and 2) not to use tutoring to dig myself out of a hole at the end of the semester, start tutoring from day one. I will keep this in mind and use all of my necessary resources to get through my classes.

This meeting served as a reminder of all the requirements for the scholarship. This is something we needed being that so many of us have questions through the GroupMe app. The majority of all the questions were answered through this refresher so we should all be in a place where we should be on top of everything going forward. Not that we will not have questions because we will but at least we received the reminders before beginning the spring semester. For me, I will be jumping on my hours early on so that I do not have a problem with cancellations towards the end of the semester.