Retr3at

Well, it's real now. Third and final year as a Peer Mentor is fully underway, post-retreat that we had this weekend. Which was a ton of fun. What I remember about one activity, where we write down four strengths and one weakness, is that I wanted to have these readily available for the entire team to see. Everyone's strengths and weaknesses. Because while we talked about it as a group, and the inevitable balancing out that would happen, I think it would be a source of motivation (think "bulletin board material") for what we do. I know that I'm at least going to try to keep those things in mind. Especially my weakness, which was a fear of getting lazy or complacent. I can remember from my first year an activity we did a few days before Orientation itself, where everyone wrote down a fear and taped it to their back. We silently walked around, looking at everyone's fears. If there's anything I've learned in my first two years as a PM, it's to....actually, I think I'm getting a little ahead of myself. This post should just be about the retreat.

Which is hard, because I feel as though the retreat has so much to do with us as a team, even if we don't talk about it in great detail outside of the retreat. We do our bonding, we have our fun, we learn what it is to be Peer Mentors, and then we're out of there. It's a crazy fun time, it was the best five-hour night of sleep I've had in my life, and it made me ready to do this one more time.

So me as a third year...I dunno, I already feel like all of us (as PMs) are on the same level. I'm as much of a PM as anyone else on the team is, even if I've done it a couple times already. There are things that I simply cannot do as a third year, like be able to tell mentees what my First-Year Seminar was like (considering I never had one). And there are things that I can bring (as a third year) that first year PMs can't, like actually having gone through this before. The mix of everything it means to be in the role we have is what creates the team, and every person is necessary to make it what it is. By the time this is all over, we as a team would be very different had one person not been there. Think of Duke and Ryan Kelly. We are all Ryan Kelly, in a way. This team is different from any other Peer Mentor Team ever, and that's the best thing about this. It doesn't matter how many times you do it. New year, new team, and this is going to kick so much ass.