Leadership

I don't need to get too defensive about it, but I've been thinking about this stuff for a long time and it bums me out that we are having to knock on doors for departments to do stuff like this, and that, even though it gets written up in science strategies from Yale, but they really care about science average in the community, I'm just not necessarily seeing it at the level that I think might be the most interesting and impactful, but it's all about bringing students onto Yale's campus to see exactly how cool and cutting edge stuff is. But it's not like, "Hey, Yale's actually situated in New Haven." It's not the other way around.

so much in the event business, you worry about the what you're doing, how you're going to get it done, what it's going to look like? But the whys are really what gives you the support and especially moving into the future. And I found this in my experiences that a lot of people want to be able to support you and give you the whys and tell others about the whys. But I feel like our job sometimes is to provide that verbiage to tell them what the whys are and then to give them examples. See this did this instead of so much the what. Because I think when I'm talking to board members with limited resources, they're looking at how much time they're going to have to put in and where are we going to get the money and why are we doing this in the first place? So it's not really the what, which we all get hung up on, but I think we need to have this so well thought through and to be able to show them the whys and the impact and that's what they want to support you and they want to help you gain more support, but we need to feed that to them.

it's helpful if people on your board and people in your organization can go and participate in the event and get a feel for it. Even if you don't have a lot of other data, that first hand experience of being there, being in the crowd and seeing the enthusiasm makes a huge difference especially if you're having difficulties trying to make your case and want to continue it. It's helpful to get those people down there too.